Hospitality association weighs in on proposal to ban a.m. liquor sales

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — After months of combating a mostly silent opposition, the Gallup Alcohol Action Team finally has a vocal, united group fighting its efforts to ban all Gallup alcohol sales before noon.

The Gallup Hospitality Association, a group of representatives from the local food, restaurant and hotel industries, issued its first news release Thursday. Urging people to vote "no" on March 28, it comes less then four weeks ahead of the citywide referendum.

"We just feel we needed to say something," said Charlie Chavez, the owner of Virgie's Restaurant and a member of the association.

Some 15 people make up the group. Though they've been around since the current City Hall administration took office in 2003, Chavez said, they've been meeting more often since the council certified the referendum earlier this year.

Whatever their numbers or schedule, they believe the Action Team's efforts are misguided.

A pre-noon ban, they say, will punish the entire community for the addictions of a few hundred people. Rather than dealing with the most chronic alcohol abusers, they say, the ban will have its greatest affect on the city's responsible drinkers and dealers.

Road to recovery
As dire as the community's struggles with alcohol abuse may be, Chavez said, things have improved over the past several years.

According to the association, the number of protective custody pickups in Gallup dropped from 25,000 in 2002 to just over 14,000 in 2005. And of the 16,000 pickups in 2004, in claims, only 477 involved chronic cases.

No one seems to know for sure what factors to attribute the decline to; the Na'Nizhoozhi Center, the local alcohol treatment facility, credits its recently implemented intervention teams for a good part of it. Although Ray Daw, the center's director, did not have all his data on hand, he said the association's numbers sounded about right. He defined the constant repeaters as those who show up at the center three to four times a month.

And even though the Action Team has praised the responsibility of most local liquor dealers, Chavez bridles at the stigma he feels a citywide ban casts on them all.

He thinks his business has a decent record for more than a decade of business: "You'd be surprised how many people and they're friends of mine that my servers turn away."

He doesn't think much of the action team's belief that a pre-noon ban will cut down on the overall incidence of public intoxication in Gallup, either. Pushing the dealers' business back a few hours, Chavez believes, will only give determined alcoholics extra time to scrape together that much more money.

"You think with that extra money they're going to buy a loaf of bread or some baloney?" he said. "I don't think so."

Boon for bootleggers?
With fewer hours in the day to buy alcohol, the action team is convinced that a pre-noon ban can only help.

Daw is less sure.
According to national research, he said, "control of availability of alcohol is one of the major ways to reduce chronic alcoholism and drinking."

He thinks a pre-noon ban might help reduce the incidence of public intoxication around Gallup, but only slightly.

He worries that the ban will do more to increase business for bootleggers and exacerbate the rising use of more dangerous substances such as "ocean," a mixture of water and hair spray.

Ban or no ban, Daw said, transient inebriants, those who pass through Gallup for many reasons including to drink but don't live here, "will always find a way to continue that kind of lifestyle."

Then there's the potential economic impact of a pre-noon ban.

The Hospitality Association claims it could cost the city as much as $2.5 million a year. But it's math is dubious at best.

To come up with the figure, the association makes a number of assumptions: that the ban will cost liquor dealers three hours of business a day; that the average employee earns $7 per hour; that the ban would affect 100 employees; that the wages they spend will turn over four times; that the employees spend all their wages in Gallup.

Its numbers are based much more on anecdotal experience than science, Chavez conceded.

Critics of a pre-noon ban also point out the $200,000-plus a full dispenser's liquor license goes for these days. With fewer hours in the day during which to make back the investment, they argue, entrepreneurs will be less likely to make the invest, at best stalling the city's dreams of a downtown entertainment district.

Something's fishy
Mayor Bob Rosebrough has called the economic argument against the pre-noon ban a red herring.

Lindsay Mapes, the Alcohol Action Team's secretary, was less diplomatic, going with a more scatological turn of phrase to express her feelings about the association's economic-doomsday forecast.

A pre-noon ban will probably hurt the local economy at first, Mapes conceded. But in the long run, she said, the ban if it succeeds at cleaning up the city's images will only help to boost tourism, "so Gallup can finally reach its potential."

Even if the ban does end up costing the city some economic growth, Alcohol Action Team members say it's time to put human lives ahead of the all-mighty dollar.

Despite the gains the city has made, Chavez does not deny that there's work yet to be done.

"Does it need improvement?" Chavez asked of the overall situation. "Yes. But this is not the way to do it."

Matter of opinion
If anyone's going to ban pre-noon alcohol sales in Gallup, the Hospitality Association insists, it should be the New Mexico Legislature.

"There's a right way and a wrong way, and they're going about it the wrong way," said Chavez.

That depends on whom you ask.

The city attorney, who confesses to a "gray area" in state law on the issue, thinks New Mexico's Liquor Control Act gives local option municipalities like Gallup the right to set their own hours. The Alcohol and Gaming Division, the state agency charged with enforcing the act, says it doesn't. The Attorney General's Office has declined to weigh in.

Without a court order telling it to stop, the city is going ahead with the referendum; early voting has already begun. If voters approve the ban, and the Alcohol and Gaming Division refuses to enforce it as it's suggested the courts will likely end up settling the dispute eventually.

Although Daw cannot cast a ballot in the referendum he doesn't live within city limits he's not sure how he would vote if he could. The way he sees it, all the talk of limiting sale hours misses the point.

"It's a Band-Aid on one of several problems in our community," he said, and one of the smaller ones at that.

Daw attributes the community's persistent struggles with alcohol abuse to three main problems: the encampments around Gallup that allow most of the area's transient inebriants to elude attention; the easy routes to cash, from panhandling to day-labor gigs, that let them feed their addictions; and the prevalence of bootlegging and substitutes like ocean.

The solutions, Daw admits, won't come easy.