The Shreveport City Council agenda for the next regular session on Aug. 23 will have many alcohol ordinances on a second reading.
This means that the council can vote on these changes.
Unfortunately, these ordinances were not vetted in a Public Safety Committee meeting.
To date, there has been very little discussion about these wholesale changes.
Perhaps the most significant proposed change is to eliminate the requirement of physical separation for the sale of hard alcohol.
Currently, retail stores cannot sell hard alcohol unless there is a separate, walled area with a separate door.
There are many good reasons to maintain this requirement.
Here are the most salient; they are not listed in any particular order of importance:
1. Many citizens have complained about the large number of liquor stores in certain neighborhoods and the problems caused by this saturation. Removing the physical separation requirement would no doubt increase locations where hard alcohol can be purchased, including these neighborhoods.
2. Allowing the expansion of hard liquor sales, without physical separation, opens floodgates for large retail chains to add liquor to their inventory of goods for purchase. Think Dollar General, Walgreens, Walmart, Brookshire’s, Target and others. Much like the very negative impact of Walmart on small retail stores, adding liquor to these retail giants will no doubt hurt the bottom line of locally owned businesses that have many employees. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that new jobs will be created by adding hard liquor to the inventory of these chains.
3. The purposed change does not have any limits on where hard alcohol can be displayed, how it can be merchandised, or how monitored to prevent theft and underage sales. With self-checkouts now in vogue in grocery chains, underage sales will become more problematic, and theft may as well.
4. Shreveport is not Bossier, where hard liquor can be purchased at grocery stores. And Shreveport is not Greenwood, which prevents the sale of hard alcohol. The comparison between Shreveport and Bossier on hard alcohol sales does not merit much weight when considering in toto the similarities and differences between the two cities. Bossier's population increase and Shreveport's decrease are not related to buying liquor at a grocery store.
5. And while playing the "Shreveport versus Bossier" game, it should be noted that Louisiana is the only southern state that allows the sale of hard liquor in grocery stores. The states that do not allow these sales include Texas, where Brookshire’s is headquartered, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Virginia.
6. The Caddo Parish sheriff has regular "sting" operations on the sale of alcohol to underage patrons in the parish. These have a strong deterrence effect. The Shreveport Police Department is woefully undermanned and Mayor Perkins disbanded the Vice Unit which handled these law enforcement duties.
7. Liquor stores generally have much smaller parking lots than large retail outlets. Thus it is easier for liquor store owners to police these areas from loitering, alcohol consumption in the parking lots, and trash debris. The citizen concerns of alcohol proliferation and criminal activity in the proximity of liquor retail sales will not be abated by elimination of the physical separation requirement.
This list is not all-inclusive by any means. However, it does provide substantial reasons to maintain the physical separation requirement for the sale of hard liquor in Shreveport ordinances.