By Amanda Waldroupe
Staff Writer
The City’s efforts to create an alcohol impact zone limiting the types of beers small grocery stores could sell in an effort to decrease the amount of public drinking in downtown Portland has hit another snag.
The deadline for the voluntary agreement grocery stores have been urged to sign has been extended to May 15. The original deadline was March 12, and the initiative, called Vibrant PDX, was expected to begin on April 1.
The geographic area of the zone has also changed. The original impact zone’s boundaries included all grocery stories east and north of I-405, south of Lovejoy Avenue, and west of the Willamette River. 67 grocery stores within those limits were originally asked to sign the agreement.
The Office of Neighborhood Involvement, the City bureau in charge of crafting the program, decided to exclude the part of the Pearl District north of Burnside, east of I-405 and west of NW 8th Avenue.
It added the Goose Hollow neighborhood. The new boundaries are north and east of I-405 to NW Burnside, south of NW Lovejoy Avenue, east from the intersection of Burnside and NW 8th Avenue north to the Willamette River.
According to Mike Boyer, a crime prevention specialist in the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, the total number of grocery stores in the area is now 69. 12 stores have signed the agreement.
He says stores in the Pearl District area, most notably Whole Foods, have been excluded from the agreement because they did not carry the types of alcohol a targeted survey by the private security firm Portland Patrol, Inc. showed were favored by street drinkers. “There were a good number of detoxes, but not products,” Boyer says.
Boyer says the deadline was extended because not enough stores had signed on. Many store owners refused to sign onto the agreement, arguing their sales will decrease and that it will not solve the street drinking problem. “It wasn’t going to be effective for everybody,” Boyer says.
He isn’t surprised, but he is disappointed. “I really hoped we would have had agreement from all the businesses,” Boyer says.
He also points that the stipulations of the agreement regarding what types of alcohol would be on the ban list also changed dramatically. “Everything changed so much,” Boyer says. “We had to look at it from a lot of different ways.”
The agreement originally stipulated that stores would not sell any alcohol sold in a 12 ounce or 16 ounce bottle. That would have included all microbrews, which store owners argued were a popular product that people engaging in street drinking were not buying.
The agreement changed to allow store owners to sell microbrews, as well as 16-ounce bottles of beer that did not have an alcohol content of 5.75 percent an ounce (with the exception of microbrews).
Doug Peterson, the owner of Peterson’s Convenience Stores, signed the agreement once it allowed the sale of microbrews and 16 ounce bottles. Those sales account for 30 percent of his beer sales, which make up 10 percent of his total business.
“It really didn’t impact us in a big way,” Peterson says. “It didn’t seem to be a severe enough restriction to live with and deal with.”
But he understands why grocery store owners continue not to sign. He says many of them have customers who favor beverages with higher alcohol content, whether they abuse it or not. “It depends on your customer base,” Peterson says, whether a storeowner would want to sign it or not.
The initiative, called “VibrantPDX,” is a voluntary agreement between grocery stores and the Office of Neighborhood Involvement not to sell alcoholic beverages of high alcohol content. That includes beverages known as “malt liquor,” which have high alcohol content — higher than 8 percent of alcohol per ounce.
The purpose of the program is to decrease what proponents call “street drinking,” or drinking in public. It is illegal in Portland, and offenders are given a citation, which does not come with fines or other types of punishment (it is the same level of punishment given to people who violated the now former “sit-lie” ordinance).
The Portland Police Bureau gave 1,700 citations for public drinking in the proposed ban area in 2009. That accounts for 55 percent of all public drinking in the city.
If not enough store owners sign the agreement voluntarily, the City is willing to work with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) to declare downtown Portland an alcohol impact area. Doing so would create mandatory guidelines store owners would be required to follow regarding what types of alcohol they could and could not carry. An extensive public process is required before the OLCC can make a recommendation that the alcohol ban be mandatory, and that can take at least a year, starting late this summer or early fall.
At this point, Boyer says, that is looking like an inevitable next step.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to be an effective voluntary agreement,” Boyer says.
There will be one more public meeting on the issue to take place on Wednesday, April 21 at City Hall.