To submit your comments or opposition to the issuance of a OLCC license, use this form: Application Comment Form
Our neighbor Rick Sills writes this update to a post earlier this week about the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s apparent lack of interest in considering neighborhood input into licenses:
By way of background, Ken Peterson, the Grant Park Neighborhood Association’s (GPNA) Land Use Chair, and the GPNA have for months been working to try to mitigate alcohol-related problems in their neighborhood . Neighbors understood that these problems would only be made worse by the proposal of yet another convenience store (Jacksons #562) at the corner of N.E. 33rd and Broadway that would sell alcohol. This proposed store will also be within 500 feet of Beverly Cleary Grade School, which is already adversely being impacted by alcohol-related problems near the school. On 10/25/12, the OLCC Commissioners, after being fully informed at a public hearing of alcohol-related problems near Beverly Cleary Grade School and of strong neighborhood opposition, with apparent indifference to the livability of Grant Park and the safety of its schoolchildren, granted the proposed store an unrestricted OLCC license.
Recently, after months of advocacy, neighborhood activism, and mounting public pressure from N.E. neighbors, Jacksons Food Stores has voluntarily signed a comprehensive Good Neighbor Agreement (GNA) with the GPNA (an unsigned copy of this GNA is attached). Ken Peterson deserves special recognition and thanks for his efforts in negotiating this GNA.
Even though the OLCC will not enforce a GNA between a neighborhood association and an OLCC licensee, for Grant Park NA to get Jacksons Food Stores voluntarily to agree to a comprehensive GNA is a significant accomplishment.
And yet, from the standpoint of fundamental fairness, it seems completely unacceptable that neighborhood associations must continue to go begging OLCC licensees to respect the safety and livability of their neighborhoods. The safety of our neighborhoods should not be a gift that neighbors must beg from local businesses, to either grant or not grant, but a basic right. Neighborhoods need new tools that will allow them to control the character of their neighborhoods and to prevent neighborhoods from being overwhelmed by too many OLCC licensees, new mechanisms that will compel OLCC licensees, at the risk of losing their licenses, to honor Good Neighbor Agreements. Changes to the OLCC are needed that will place the safety and livability of neighborhoods at the center of OLCC licensing decisions rather than subordinating these vital neighborhood interests to the business interests of the alcohol industry. Although it’s only a small step, the Safety and Livability Team (SALT), a committee of the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods (NECN) met on Monday evening, 11/19/12, and, as an item on the agenda, discussed the issue of OLCC license saturation.
Discussions of this issue were greatly assisted by the vivid recollections of the Office of Neighborhood Involvement’s Celeste Carey concerning her three-and-a-half years of work on the “Saturation Task Force” (some five years ago), a task force meant to address the problem of OLCC license saturation in neighborhoods. Despite Celeste’s long hours of dedicated civic engagement on this Task Force, her best efforts ended in disappointment–with the problems that brought people to the Task Force for several years left unresolved. It was clear from Celeste’s comments at the SALT meeting that the problems relating to OLCC license saturation continue and that communities throughout Oregon deserve a better result.
Following a robust discussion of the saturation issue, including saturation near public schools, SALT unanimously voted to form an “OLCC Subcommittee” to research OLCC-related community issues, to catalyze inter-neighborhood dialogue about both these issues and their possible solutions, and to report back its findings to SALT.
To submit your comments or opposition to the issuance of a OLCC license, use this form: Application Comment Form