ABC Recommendations (AP)
The Joint Study Committee on Alcoholic Beverage Control has recommended that the General Assembly give the state ABC Commission authority to set performance standards and training requirements for local ABC boards. However, the panel declined to recommend more drastic reforms to the state’s liquor system. The watered down legislation recommended by the panel would also require local stores to follow the same rules local governments do in carrying out their annual budgets. “Right now you can have a drawer full of cash at an ABC store and you just pay the bills and anything else you want to buy,” said ABC Commission Chairman Jon Williams, adding that the changes are the “kind of transparent cash management” the public expects to see.
Committee members took out language that would have allowed the state commission to merge local boards to ensure a troubled store becomes profitable. Instead, the state panel could only make recommendations to the local board. A cap on local ABC employee salaries was weakened. The panel also deleted wording that would have subjected the state’s nearly 170 local boards to the state government ethics law, meaning hundreds of members of boards would have to fill out annual economic disclosure statements that could identify potential conflicts of interests. Now they’d only have to comply with ethics rules that their county commissions or town councils approve, which may or may not be stringent. “We gutted it,” said Sen. Dan Clodfelter, D-Mecklenburg, the sole committee member voting against the final recommended legislation. “They took out the ethical standards.” The committee’s proposal will go to the Legislature for consideration when it reconvenes next week. The proposal was amended several times by the committee comprised of lawmakers, local government officials and ABC leaders and almost certainly would change more if the House or Senate vote on it. Gov. Beverly Perdue, who would be asked to sign any bill into law, also would have something to say about the proposal.
Earlier Wednesday, Perdue’s Budget Reform and Accountability Commission recommended to the governor that local ABC board members to comply with the state government ethics law, limit compensation of store operators and give the state commission more power to close underperforming stores. Williams told Perdue’s commission the changes it sought would respond to some “very embarrassing problems to everyone who works in the system.” ABC reform accelerated following news reports about a liquor company employee treating Mecklenburg County ABC board employees and leaders to an extravagant dinner and how New Hanover County’s father-and-son store administrators got paid more than $400,000 combined.(Gary D. Robertson, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 5/05/10).
