You won’t believe why Everett may ban booze

Alcohol is bad. So bad that the City of Everett is considering an outright ban of alcohol in certain areas of the city, following in the footsteps of Seattle and Spokane and Tacoma and Olympia.

Right now the Everett City Council is trying to figure out if they want to establish Alcohol Impact Areas where the sale of high alcohol content beverages would be banned.

But I think they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

The thinking is if you ban the high content booze, you’ll be tackling the problem of chronic public inebriation or illegal activities linked to the consumption of alcohol.

As the Downtown Everett Association notes:

“Once an Alcohol Impact Area is recognized by the Washington State Liquor Control Board, conditions or restrictions may be applied, such as:

-Restricting the off-premises sale of certain alcohol products (banned products list)
-Restricting the business hours of operation for off-premises consumption liquor sales
-Restrictions on container sizes available for sale”

Downtown Everett is the spot they’re thinking about putting in the ban and they’ll vote on April 15.

Now, I think the city council and the mayor have their hearts in the right place, but this is a bad idea on a number of levels, and we can start with the fact that they don’t really work.

Case in point: you know which part of Seattle is under an Alcohol Impact Area? Pioneer Square!

You can go there at almost any time of day and bump into a drunkard. Also, Pioneer Square is chock-full of crime.

The Downtown Everett Association claims, “Limiting the sale of these products has been shown to significantly reduce public inebriation and alcohol-related garbage.”

Maybe, but they don’t make a good case. In fact, they don’t back up that claim in any meaningful way at all.

So they link to three cities to show how they work. They lead with Pioneer Square, which we all know is full of inebriated people and trash (and a large part of that is the proximity to Safeco and Century Link, along with the high population of homeless people, many of which suffer from alcohol addiction).

Next, they point to an article from 2011 in the Queen Anne News with outdated and somewhat irrelevant and unconvincing data.

Then they point to a YouTube video clip of a report from KXLY from Spokane that simply states they are going to do the ban, not the results of an actual ban.

Now part of the reason this ban doesn’t really work is it goes after certain types of alcohol – most notably, malt liquor because it’s super cheap and can get you blasted really quickly.

And because downtown Everett isn’t that big of a place, you’re just going to push the problem, as you perceive it, down a few blocks. If people are hell-bent on hanging out in downtown Everett, they’ll still do it and they’ll still be drunk.

My sense, from reading between the lines, is the city is really trying to get homeless people from drinking – they’re trying to further criminalize homelessness.

Here’s why. The Everett Herald reported Monday that “Everett is in the implementation phase of the Community Streets Initiative, a task force that released a long list of recommendations last year to combat chronic homelessness, street nuisances, mental health problems and addiction, especially downtown.”

And at the same time, they’re pushing two other ordinances. First, they’re trying to ban drivers from handing money to pedestrians. This is how the Herald explains it:

“[The ordinance] would prohibit solicitation or other transactions between drivers and pedestrians within 60 feet of an intersection with a signal or in median strips.”

In other words, don’t give homeless any money when they’re asking for it on the sides of roads.

The second ordinance? It stops people from sitting or lying on sidewalks in parts of Everett. In other words, “Hey homeless people! Stop sleeping on the streets!” It also stops people from handing out food without a permit.

As the Herald notes, “The latter proposal is in response to the large semi-permanent homeless encampment that had set up near the mission in the I-5 underpass.”

So this is all a roundabout way at criminalizing homeless, which doesn’t work because you’re not actually doing anything to help the homeless. You’re just criminalizing their behavior.

Maybe if they spent half as much time coming up with ways to help homeless, rather than criminalize them, they’d be closer to dealing with the issue?