Liquor sales subject of local petition drive

Some local residents are attempting to force an election on the city’s new Sunday off-sale liquor law.

If they can gather 481 petition signatures from locally registered voters by Monday, the law will be put on hold and placed on a future election ballot.

The law was passed July 6 by the Mitchell City Council. It would legalize Sunday sales of “off-sale” liquor, which is liquor consumed off the premises of the establishment making the sale. The law would affect places such as liquor stores and the liquor sections of grocery and convenience stores.

If enough valid petition signatures are filed, the City Council could schedule a special election or wait until the next municipal election date in the spring of 2010.

The petition drive was started Saturday by the Rev. Carroll Torberson, of Grace Baptist Church, and has been joined by members of 10 to 12 other local churches, he said. He had not counted the signatures and had no estimate of the number gathered through Wednesday afternoon.

His aim is to protect Sunday as a day set aside for Christian religious observances.

“There are getting to be so few vestiges of the Christian culture in our society — we’re basically outlawing God,” Torberson said Wednesday. “One of the last things we have left is Sunday.”

Torberson also thinks it’s foolish to make alcohol more available, because many crimes are alcohol-related. The Rev. Keith Nash expressed a similar view Wednesday, saying it’s unwise to loosen alcohol restrictions when many people in the community, including teenagers, struggle with alcohol abuse.

“While I’m not necessarily thinking that prohibition worked very well, there are reasons why our society has set in place a bunch of limits on the sale of alcohol,” Nash said. “Those limits have been systematically and consistently knocked down over the last 20 years, and I don’t think that’s really progress.”

The City Council’s July 6 vote to approve the new law was 4-3, with one member absent. Current City Councilman Mel Olson was a councilman-elect when the vote was taken, but he attended the meeting and spoke against the ordinance.

“When the rest of us have six days in a week, I just don’t see why the minority can’t have one day a week,” Olson said Wednesday.

The ordinance was originally proposed by City Council President Jeff Smith, who said he began thinking about the issue after Sioux Falls passed a similar ordinance. Smith said the new city law constitutes a minor change, because off-sale malt beverages can already be sold on Sundays.

“I’m fairly certain there won’t be a large increase in sales taxes from this,” Smith said. “I’m looking at it more as a service to our tourists that come through, our hunters that come through, and a farmer or rancher who might come to town once a week. It opens it up so they have the ability to purchase whatever they would like.”

State law dictates that local ordinances take effect on the 20th day after their publication in the governing body’s legal newspaper. The new offsale liquor law was published July 13 and is therefore set to take effect Sunday.

State law also says that if the effective date of an ordinance falls on a weekend, the deadline to file petitions aimed at referring the ordinance to an election is 5 p.m. the next business day. That puts the deadline for Torberson and his fellow petition circulators at 5 p.m. Monday.

Torberson had been operating on the assumption that, because City Hall is not open on Sunday, the deadline to file the petitions would be this Friday. When he was informed of the state law that pushes the petition deadline to Monday if a law takes effect on a Sunday, he found significance in it.

“Isn’t that interesting,” he said. “Sunday must be something special for some reason.”

Tags: city council, news, local, alcohol, liquor