Dining up, drinking down after law change

Getting rid of membership requirements at clubs hasn't boosted liquor sales, state alcohol regulators were told Tuesday.

In fact, the amount of liquor sold by the state to Utah's equivalent of bars fell 9.2 percent, or nearly $250,000, in July and August of this year, compared with the same period last year.

And club licensees are telling regulators they are serving more food to customers than before lawmakers eliminated the need to fill out a membership application and pay a fee to enter a club.

"More people are going to clubs to eat now that they can get in without a membership," Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission Chairman Sam Granato said after the meeting. "We always maintained people weren't going to the clubs as a watering hole … People go to eat and enjoy the company of others in a more adult fashion."

Granato said the sales figures counter concerns that the change, which took effect July 1, would result in an increase in alcohol consumption.

Commissioner Bobbie Coray said she was pleased. "I didn't think the private-club designation made any sense, and I didn't think it reduced drinking," she said. "This is a validation of that."

A spokeswoman for the Utah Hospitality Association agreed that allowing easier access to alcohol has not translated into more drinking.

"Basically, the news is nothing happened with the elimination of the private-club requirement, but the economy dropped the numbers," the association's Lisa Marcy said. "Despite all the hoopla, the average person in Utah was underwhelmed by the change."

The department's deputy director of finance, Leonard Langford, who reported the drop in club sales to the commission, also said overall alcohol sales rose slightly.

During the same July and August that saw a decline in state alcohol sales to private clubs, Langford said, there was about a 3 percent overall increase in alcohol sales over the same two months in 2008.

Utah sold just more than $267 million worth of liquor, wine and heavy-alcohol beer in the budget year that ended June 30, about $10.5 million more than the previous budget year. Consumption of each type of product sold through the state also increased, up from an average of just over 2.1 gallons per capita to about 2.2 gallons.

Also at Tuesday's meeting, commissioners issued all but one of the six remaining full-service restaurant licenses available under the state quota system. Granato and the restaurant association have called on state lawmakers to eliminate the population-based quotas during the 2010 Legislature. But Gov. Gary Herbert and many legislators have said they want to wait a while before making any more substantial changes to the state's liquor laws. Eliminating private clubs in the 2009 session was widely seen as the biggest change to those laws in decades.

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