Dispute Revolves Around Singles

From an e-mail to protestants, reprinted with permission.

At the community meeting [at the Washington Community Fellowship church] on Monday night, about 20 people showed up to discuss how to proceed on the question of N-A Minit's prospective purchase of Excello's Class A liquor license. Many people showed up to support Mrs. Lee, the owner of N-A Minit, though I'm not sure that the attendees were actually proportionately representative of the community.

The net effect of this purchase would be threefold:

1) There would only be one liquor store at that location — which would be wonderful; 2) the sole liquor store would be owned by Mr. and Mrs. Lee, whom many of the residents think are very neighborly, and Mr. Bang, the owner of Excello would be gone — which would be wonderful; and 3) that store would be permitted to sell singles of beer and malt liquor. Right now, Excello's Voluntary Agreement bars them from selling singles, but N-A Minit is permitted to sell singles, so this really would not be a change for the worse.

Most of the dispute revolves around the third item. The dispute between those who oppose the sale and those who support it seems to boil down to this: N-A Minit will only purchase Excello's license if they can remove the provision now in Excello's Voluntary Agreement in which Excello agrees not to sell single-serving bottles of alcohol. This raises two major concerns:

First, many are worried that N-A Minit will stop selling food items and sell only liquor (which they would be permitted to do with a Class A license and which they cannot do with a Class B license). This deprives the community — especially older residents and others who don't drive — of a source of groceries.

Second, all of the liquor stores on H Street that have gone through renewal now have Voluntary Agreements which include a ban on singles. If N-A Minit is permitted to sell singles, then all of the people along the H Street corridor who can no longer buy singles there will congregate in front of N-A Minit. Furthermore, it would make it virtually impossible to include the ban on singles in future voluntary agreements, because merchants would say, "Well, if they can sell singles, why can't I?"

There is a third more minor concern, which is what use would the Excello space be put to? There is no guarantee that the new business that would go in there would be much improvement over the current situation.

In addition, though probably two-thirds of the attendees at the community meeting seemed to support Mrs. Lee, it isn't really clear that she enjoys that much wider community support. After all, if she is such a good neighbor, then how come there remains so much loitering and trash in front of the store? But, much more importantly, as one person pointed out, Mrs. Lee is not in business to be a good neighbor so much as to be a successful and profitable merchant. She's not in business for the benefit of the neighborhood.

Many in support of the sale worry that a protest against renewal of Excello's liquor license (which is now pending) will not be successful. Some are under the misconception that the ABC Board never supports protestants. That is absolutely not true. Also, Mrs. Lee's lawyer pointed out that the ABC Board has never imposed a restriction on single sales — but they have not had to, because that restriction appears in dozens of Voluntary Agreements around the city.

I'm not sure that we have a solution at this point. [ANC Commissioner 6A05] Michael Musante called for a vote on the matter at the community meeting, but I really don't think that's the solution. It divides us rather than joins us. I'd rather see some effort to come to a consensus, such as an agreement to push aggressively toward a voluntary agreement that everyone can agree to. I (for one) am not convinced that it truly is impossible to get an agreement that bans the sale of singles, despite Mrs. Lee's statements now. §