Minnesota Sunday liquor sales stir differing views

It doesn’t take much effort to become a champion of Sunday liquor sales, State Sen. Roger Reinert told a crowd of people Thursday. Yet people often ask him why he doesn’t put his energy into something else, he said.
“Believe it or not,” said Reinert, DFL-Duluth, “this is not my number one issue. Repealing our Sunday sales law is not high on my priority list. I put something just above no effort into it.”
Still, Reinert’s outspokenness against the state’s ban on Sunday liquor sales has made him among the topic’s go-to leaders. So it was that he found himself as part of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy’s panel discussion at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Weber Music Hall. Reinert said he appreciated the panel because it created more debate than the topic often is afforded in the Legislature. There, he said, the issue is often met with quick disapproval by the majority of legislators. Last year, even a compromise like offering the sale of tap room growlers was dismissed.  
“We couldn’t even do that,” Reinert said, “which was frustrating.”
The panelists represented the state Legislature, a beer activist group and a municipal liquor store, and included people on both sides of the issue.
The municipal liquor store operator, Edina, Minn., City Manager Scott Neal, favored the
current Sunday ban, and so did State Rep. Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights. Atkins said he can’t justify having the many positive things that come out of the annual omnibus liquor bill - a collection of all prospective liquor legislation - fail for having something so controversial attached to it.
Neal said Edina’s municipal liquor store wouldn’t increase sales the additional 10 percent required to make Sunday sales profitable.  
But Reinert represents a city he feels is being penalized for its inability to sell liquor on Sundays. The craft beer industry, he said, “has become a genuine economic sector in Duluth.” Additionally, he represents a border city that he said sees “Minnesota dollars being spent in Wisconsin on Sundays.” He noted the proximity of liquor stores at the base of the bridges leading from Duluth to Superior.
“That’s the market saying something - ‘Minnesota, you’re losing money,’ ” Reinert said.
The discussion was witnessed by mostly college students. Afterward, one student said he really wanted a beer after listening to all the talk about liquor. A retired pastor talked about the public health costs of adding Sunday liquor sales, saying he feared it would increase alcohol consumption.
Reinert called the public health factor the argument for the ban that he considered most valid.  
Andrew Schmitt, executive director of Minnesota Beer Activists, said Sunday sales might make people safer than asking them to seek out bars for their Sunday libations.
“They’d be home,” Schmitt said. “It would create safer roadways.”
All the panelists agreed the state’s residents overwhelmingly support Sunday sales, and they cited surveys that indicated as much as 70 percent of the state’s residents favor the change. But the support is often cursory. The legislators who decide things say they hear mostly from law enforcement and religious leaders, the Teamsters who transport the liquor and the mom-and-pop liquor store owners who are all vehemently against lifting the Sunday ban.   
 “It’s this broad-and-shallow verses narrow-and-deep issue,” Reinert said.
Atkins admitted it’s the willingness of the ban’s supporters to call and write that sways legislators like him to simply steer clear of the issue.  
The broad supporters of Sunday sales, said Schmitt, are rallying their cause.
“People are upset,” he said. “They feel they’re not being heard.”
Reinert’s hope is that 2015 brings the growler sales that once seemed possible before crashing at the end of the last session. He also said a local option could be pursued that would allow city or county boards to choose for themselves whether to lift the ban.
“I think that’s the reasonable step forward,” he said.