What Blake Harrison wants is for grocery and convenience stores across Colorado to stock wine and full-strength beer if they so choose.
But his recently filed ballot initiative to allow that could instead harm his cause by giving lawmakers, annually faced with a similar bill, an escape hatch for what has historically been a difficult vote, analysts say.
Neither the supermarket nor the convenience-store coalitions support the initiative and say that having it hanging over the state Capitol during the upcoming legislative session could affect their own efforts to open shelves to stronger libations.
Faced with those possible repercussions, Harrison said he’s amenable to changes to the initiative and points out that the vetting process wouldn’t allow him to secure a place for it on the 2010 ballot until after the session lets out.
“People don’t really care about the details, they just want to be able to do their shopping at one place,” said Harrison, a Denver deputy district attorney who is running for a House seat. “I’m just afraid we’re going to have the same situation as in the last two years, where nothing happens. At some point, it just needs to be put to the people.”
The effect of his new initiative, which gets its first legislative council hearing Tuesday, would depend on the momentum behind it, said political analyst Katy Atkinson.
“It could make it easier to vote against doing it legislatively. It allows legislators to take a cop-out if they want to,” she said. “But unless he has a lot of his own money, you have to wonder how serious the effort is.”
The fight for strong beer and wine in grocery and convenience stores — which, with just a few exceptions, under current law can carry only 3.2 percent alcohol beer — has become an annual one at the Capitol.
Parades of liquor-store owners line up for hours to tell committees how grocery-store sales would put them out of business. They’re matched by teams of convenience-store franchisees who argue that customers barely buy beer from them now that liquor stores are open Sundays.
So far, lawmakers have sided with liquor stores.
What Grier Bailey, lobbyist for the Colorado Petroleum Marketers Association, has learned is that lawmakers are more amenable to smaller changes to the state’s arcane liquor laws.
He said he respects Harrison’s pro-consumer perspective, but his initiative, which is lifted almost directly from a piece of failed 2008 legislation, is not the way to go.
“It doesn’t take into account legislative intent, in terms of either reforming or changing step by step Colorado liquor laws,” Bailey said. “It ignores a lot of issues of small businesses on both sides of the aisle.”
The initiative would allow supermarkets and convenience stores to dedicate 5 percent of their floor space to wine and full-strength beer. A quarter of that space must be dedicated to smaller producers.
In turn, liquor stores now banned from selling food items could dedicate 5 percent of their floor space to snacks and other items.
A group representing the larger liquor stores isn’t worried about a potential ballot initiative, said a spokesman, Ben Davis.
The Colorado Licensed Beverage Association’s internal polling of 600 drinking-age Coloradans shows at best a near-even split between those who favor grocery-store booze and those who oppose it, with slightly more opposing, he said.
“It doesn’t affect us because the public doesn’t want it,” Davis said.
His opponents point to at least 36 other states where shoppers happily buy full-strength beer and wine in the supermarket.
A ballot initiative that failed to win enough votes could leave grocery and convenience stores with a massive hangover, Atkinson said.
“If it fails, there’s no way they’re going to make it happen legislatively,” she said. “Unless they have a very good feeling that they’re going to pass it, it’s high risk to put it on the other side.”
Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244 or jfender@denverpost.com
