In a decision reserved only for complex cases, the Calvert County Board of License Commissioners, or Liquor Board, deferred a ruling Thursday night on whether to allow the wine and beer license holders of Woodburns Beverages to transfer the license from the closed Woodburns of Solomons to the Lusby Food Lion supermarket chain store.“It’s been our policy to make a decision immediately following a hearing,” Chairman J. Allen Swann said after hearing almost three hours worth of support and opposition for the transfer. “I think there’s a very good chance of appeal no matter which way it goes. We want to make the best, the properest decision.”
At the start of the hearing, Swann addressed the full house, admitting a decision would not be easy because Maryland’s liquor laws are not always clear-cut. “A lot of things are left up to the discretion of the board. If it was black and white on paper we wouldn’t be here,” he said, adding that Thursday’s hearing was one of the largest crowds he has seen.
After more than 50 years in business, Woodburns closed April 16. Now, Thomas F. McKay, president of Woodburns Food and secretary and treasurer of Woodburns Beverages, plans to open again in the Food Lion in the shopping center off H.G. Trueman Road. The specialty meats and cheeses for which the store is known will be sold along with the other produce in the Food Lion grocery store, and Woodburns Beverages will consist of a cornered-off section of the store where wine and beer will be shelved.
Customers would purchase the alcohol at the Food Lion registers, but McKay, who has owned Woodburns for 20 years, said all of the profits would go to Woodburns, and Lusby Food Lion store manager Mike Wetherald assured the board no one younger than 19 would be able to sell alcohol at the registers. Also, all employees would be required to undergo training and pass a test related to the sale of alcohol and tobacco before the register would allow them access. Self-checkout aisles would not allow alcohol to be scanned without an attendant’s approval. Liquor sale certification training is scheduled for all employees this week, he said.
Wetherald said he never has had any liquor sale violations, and he used to work for Woodburns. Food Lion Director Rick Winningham, who has been in charge of supervising the sale of beer and wine at grocery stores in Virginia and also never has had any violations, said the Woodburns section of the Lusby store would be up and running within a matter of days once the license transfer is approved.
Board member Alonzo Barber said he was concerned that while loopholes in the law may allow for this scenario to take place, there are state regulations that prohibit the sale of alcohol in chain stores to protect the smaller liquor businesses around them. Putting wine and beer in a chain store where customers can buy it with their groceries, he said, “that’s like the gold mine.”
Winningham said he believes this specific situation, transfering a small business that sells alcohol and placing it inside a chain supermarket, is a first in Maryland, although Food Lions in Easton, Salisbury and Mitchellville have been granted liquor licenses. This would be a first for Calvert.
McKay’s attorney, Mark Davis, said there would be no change in ownership under the transfer and the stockholders would remain the same, with McKay owning 45 percent of the company, his sister, Elizabeth Johnson, who will continue to supervise the store when it relocates to Food Lion, owning another 45 percent, and Susan Jones of Lusby at 10 percent.
McKay said he believes the transfer is necessary because it is the only alternative for Woodburns to stay in business and, when he took over the company, he promised its former owners, Edgar and Isabel Woodburns, that he would not let the business die.
“I committed to him at the time that we would do everything we could to try and keep Woodburns alive,” he said, showing the board two memorial plaques for Edgar and Isabel that hung outside of the Solomons store and will continue to hang outside of the new location.
However, Leda McKay of Lusby, the Woodburns’ daughter, was among the transfer’s protestors at the hearing.
“I feel very strongly about this issue,” she said, adding that her parents believed in shopping local and that the small businessman was the “backbone” of the community. “This proposal seems to be an underhanded and shady way to do business, and it will open the door for other chain stores to have a liquor license.”
Also among the protestors were Mike and Carolyn Hart of Patuxent Wine & Spirits, who organized a group of opposition to the transfer. With them that night were the owners of Lusby Liquors and Ranch Liquor. Hart has argued that small business owners will suffer from the competition of the chain supermarket in their neighborhood. Carolyn McHugh, president and CEO of the Calvert County Chamber of Commerce, defended the stores, siding against the transfer in a letter to the board and during the hearing.
“Would I like to be able to go to the grocery store and pick up a bottle of wine? Sure, but I’ll go to Virginia to do that,” she said before the hearing began and later addressed the board, “It’s very foggy about where the accountability is in this. ... While there may be a loophole in the law, we do not feel it meets the spirit of the law.”
Calvert County Commissioners Steve Weems (R) and Gerald W. “Jerry” Clark (R), both liquor store owners, also listened to the hearing.
“The only issue I have either way is the chain store ordinance,” Clark said after the meeting. “There’s a chain store law in Maryland for a reason. Whatever happens here, this could set a precedent.”
Hart’s attorney, Steve Wise, said he didn’t think the license could be transferred because the law states it may be transferred to a similar establishment, and McKay said he would classify both Woodburns and Food Lion as supermarkets because of their sizes.
“I don’t think it could be more dissimilar,” Wise said, calling Woodburns a “shell. But you’ve got Food Lion running it, Food Lion stocking the shelves, Food Lion checking it out.”
Part of the law also requires that the transfer be necessary to accommodate the public. Because the County Filling Station, FaStop, CJ’s Market, Southern Liquor Store, Ranch Liquor, Patuxent Wine & Spirits and Lusby Liquors are all within a 2-mile radius of the Food Lion and all sell alcohol, Wise said he doesn’t think there is a need to accommodate the public.
But Davis said “accommodation” is open to interpretation. He researched the shopping centers in Calvert and of the 10 centers with a grocery store the one with the Lusby Food Lion is the only shopping center without a liquor store.
“I think that’s important,” he said.
Three members of the community spoke in favor of the transfer at the hearing, for various reasons, but Jennifer Weitzel of Lusby summed them all up in her testimony. She said her mom was a Woodburns patron when she was a child, and Weitzel, now married with three kids, continued to shop at Woodburns for her alcohol until it closed.
“When I heard about this I was excited because I have a 3-year-old and I go to Food Lion a lot for my groceries,” she said, adding that she avoids going to liquor stores with her 3-year-old and has to have other people pick up the alcohol she’d like. “Now when I have parties I don’t have to have someone pick it up for me.”
Weitzel said she finds the activity outside of some of the liquor stores in Lusby to be shady, “just the crowd I’ve seen out there, I just don’t like that.” She would feel more comfortable buying wine at Food Lion, she said, which also closes at 11 p.m., earlier than other liquor stores, attracting a different kind of crowd, Davis said.
“I’ve talked to quite a few people and they were excited, too,” Weitzel said.
While the board made no indication as to how it will rule, Swann said he knows the law was meant to keep big-box chain stores from competing with local small businesses.
“If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck,” he said. However, he also added, “It’s not the job of this board, nor have we ever tried, to protect a license holder from competition.”
In other business, Swann announced that the hearing would be his last, as he plans to resign after 25 years on the board and six months as its chairman.
0 comments:
Post a Comment