Statesboro officials propose to employ an alcoholic beverage control officer, a certified police officer assigned duties such as enforcement of the minimum drinking age of 21, in the new fiscal year.
The budget requests received by City Council at its early-April retreat showed a new Alcoholic Beverage Control Fund with $92,346 in projected expenses and $109,000 in recommended revenue. But the suggestion that most of the money would come from a $1,000 increase in the annual cost of each alcoholic beverage license brought objections and reconsideration.
“Let’s just be honest,” Mayor Jan Moore said during the budget retreat. “At least half of the people out there with a license are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and so why should a person that’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing pay an extra thousand dollars for the folks that are not?”
Currently, Statesboro charges $1,250 annually for a license either to sell beer and wine for off-premises consumption or to serve beer and wine at a restaurant. But for a pouring license that authorizes liquor drinks as well as beer and wine, the annual fee is $3,750.
With about 90 licensees of both types, an added $1,000 would have provided about $90,000.
But since Moore questioned the fairness of this approach and council members asked whether a $4,750 pouring license would be near the limit, interim City Manager Robert Cheshire is looking for other ways to balance the new fund.
Interviewed more than a week ago, he hadn’t found any state limit on the license fees, and city staff members were working on a spreadsheet to compare Statesboro’s fees to other Georgia cities.
“In addition, we will look to other means of collections, or it may mean we will do it in two phases,” Cheshire said.
The $92,000 in proposed expenditures includes a $31,813 salary plus $300 in allocated overtime and about $12,000 for the officer’s medical insurance. Amounts have also been included for fuel, phone service, training and uniforms.
Some first-year expenses in the fund as originally suggested are $30,000 for a police vehicle and $3,500 for computers.
“Nothing says we have to fund that 100 percent the first year,” Cheshire said.
So, he said, the staff may trim the proposed spending by steps such as “borrowing,” for the first year, a vehicle already in the city fleet.
Cheshire said he is guided by a request from Moore to hold any fee increase to no more than about $500.
“We need to look at another way to fund it,” Moore said in an interview. “I’m not saying that the position doesn’t need to be there.”
The officer is needed, she said, but she thinks the city needs “to be much more creative,” than charging every alcohol licensee an added $1,000.
Fines for alcohol-related citations have also been suggested as a funding source. However, most of the fines in Municipal Court are paid not by the licensed businesses, but by individuals, such as employees who serve alcohol to underage drinkers. The budget proposal earmarks a total of $3,000 from alcohol-related citations for the new fund.
ABC officer’s duties
The alcoholic beverage control officer will be a sworn officer of the Statesboro Police Department, as Cpl. Justin Samples, the department’s public relations officer, confirmed in an email.
This officer “would be responsible for closely monitoring and investigating reported and suspected violations of the city of Statesboro alcohol laws as well as all other federal, state, and local laws and ordinances,” Samples said.
Community education about underage alcohol consumption would be part of the job, which may also “require the ability to perform basic patrol officer functions,” he said.
Besides conducting compliance checks and investigating cases, the officer will be expected to meet with license holders “to maintain open dialogue and discuss trends,” and would provide information to the city clerk and the Georgia Department of Revenue.
A reassignment
The current plan, said Samples and city Public Safety Director Wendell Turner, is to reassign an officer from within the department and hire to fill the created vacancy.
“Our Investigations Bureau is doing all of the alcohol compliance checks now, and we feel like if we have one person that’s singularly responsible for that role within the organization, it will be a much better process for us,” Turner said last week.
He said the consistency the officer provides should help build relationships with the license holders and with other agencies, such as the Department of Revenue.
“We’ll have a consistent level of enforcement over an extended period of time,” Turner said.
He also said he foresees a possible need for two officers over time.
The new fund, with the one officer, is in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2016, which opens July 1. With more discussion to come, the final budget will be presented to City Council for adoption after a public hearing in June, Cheshire said.
“Apples to apples” comparisons of alcohol license fees among Georgia cities can be difficult, he observed. Some cities charge by volume of sales, while others have flat fees divided into different categories.
Consolidated Athens-Clarke County, for example, in its license application, lists separate annual fees of $684 to serve wine by the drink; $855 to serve beer and $3,420 to serve liquor. Athens-Clarke also has a $3,420 charge for a package-store liquor license, a designation that does not exist in Statesboro, which does not allow the sale of liquor for off-premises consumption.
The Athens information was not supplied by Cheshire, but obtained from Athens-Clarke’s financial services administrator. It can be found online at https://athensclarkecounty.com. Statesboro’s license application, which shows the one-time, $150 application fee as well as the annual fees, can be found at www.statesboroga.gov.
Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.