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Go Wet, Young Man (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

THIS IS AN OPINION

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The news last week that a group has been formed with the goal of putting a dry-to-wet vote on the November ballot in Benton County reminded me of a modest proposal I first offered up in 2005: All Arkansas counties should go "dry" unless the voters decide otherwise.

Since I first suggested this idea, three counties have decided otherwise. Wet activists in Marion (2006) and Clark and Boone counties (2010) miraculously collected signatures from at least 38 percent of the registered voters in each county. And then, in each case, a majority of voters preferred to have package stores closer to home and to dispense with the "private club" fiction when having a drink in a restaurant.

Collecting enough signatures to put the question on the ballot is expensive. The required number of signatures is two and a half times higher than for any other direct voter initiative specifically to discourage any attempt to change the status quo. The new organization called Keep Dollars in Benton County is blessed with deep pockets in the form of two of Sam Walton’s grandsons, Jim’s boys Tom and Steuart, so I’ll be surprised if they don’t collect enough signatures and then turn out enough voters who are tired of driving to the Washington County side of Springdale or even over the border into Missouri.

My proposal would save a lot of time and expense while making sure that the alcohol laws across Arkansas match the will of the people in the 21st century. It’s a good idea, which is not to be confused with an idea that has a snowball’s chance of being considered – much less adopted – by the Arkansas General Assembly. In fact, the two seem almost mutually exclusive. But here goes anyway:

At its next general session in 2013, the Legislature should pass two laws. The first would declare that as of a certain date – say, July 1, 2015 – every county in Arkansas would be dry unless a majority of voters indicated otherwise in an election required to be held prior to that date. The first Tuesday in November 2014 sounds handy. (I think it would be fair to exempt those counties that have actually voted on this question in the previous decade.)

The other would put any subsequent changes in wet or dry status back on equal footing with every other question of direct democracy by reducing the required number of signatures on the petition back to 15 percent of registered voters. It would be wise, I think, to limit the frequency of this kind of effort to every 10 years or so; restaurants and liquor stores shouldn’t have to wonder from year to year whether they will be legal.

The beauty of my idea is that it would break up the strange bedfellows that are bent on providing the liquor industry in Arkansas with the highest possible profit margin. That would be the liquor industry itself and the bloc of conservative Christians who don’t indulge and believe that limiting or eliminating consumption by others is a righteous goal. By opposing any expansion of liquor sales into additional counties, these aginners help ensure that alcohol consumers will be funneled straight to the first-stop package store just over the county line. But they’d be hard-pressed to oppose a law that had the potential to create more dry counties. (If they believe in Regnat Populus, that is.)

For liquor store owners limited by law to a single license, having a dry county go wet – allowing someone else to grab a big chunk of their customer base – would be nearly as bad as having a wet county go dry.

Political leaders and chamber types insist that the availability of alcohol is vital for economic development, and this is the argument being made by Keep Dollars in Benton County. The fortunes of Conway, Jonesboro, Benton and Bryant in nominally dry counties as opposed to, say, Helena and Pine Bluff in wet counties suggest that argument may be a tad oversold. (Plus, I’ve long since been suspicious when the words "economic development" are applied to anything.)

But I do think that the state’s mix of dry and wet counties should be determined by the actual will of the people, which may well have changed since the 1940s, when most dry counties adopted that status. (How many of Benton County’s young men were off at war when the folks back home voted it dry in 1944?) The 38 percent law, another of Lu Hardin’s many gifts to the state, was cynically and specifically designed to make it exceedingly hard for that will to be determined and heeded.

Back in 2005 I wrote that giving Arkansans a practical opportunity to vote on the current system of wet and dry counties sounded risky because no one had any idea what the outcome would be. Since then, the three-election trend strongly suggests that dry is not as popular as it once was.

(Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.)

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