Distilled Spirits Council introduces its own grocery-store ballot measures

The Distilled Spirits Council — a Washington, D.C.-based trade association representing the hard liquor industry — on Wednesday announced that it has submitted a pair of ballot initiatives to the state of Colorado that it aims to have included on the November ballot.

The measures would serve as competition to another that is backed by grocery stores that seeks to allow sales of full-strength beer and wine at grocery stores in the state.

The Distilled Spirit Council’s first measure would allow the sales of liquor at grocery stores in addition to full-strength beer and wine. The second measure, pitched as a sort of compromise, would alternatively allow any grocery store chain or liquor store owner to have as many as 10 liquor licenses. Current state law allows liquor store owners and grocery chains to hold only one license each.

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Distilled Spirits Council officials said Wednesday that it would be unfair to add only beer and wine to grocery store shelves without allowing liquor that same kind of access to the consumer.

Due to Colorado’s current laws, most grocery stores in the state have liquor stores next door. But a major fear of opponents to the beer and wine ballot measure is that many of those independently and locally owned liquor stores would see their sales decimated and be forced to go out of business. That, too, would reduce distilled spirits makers’ access to customers.

“There’s going to be several hundred liquor stores that will be closing up if only beer and wine go into grocery stores, and that’s going to put us at a huge disadvantage from a competitive standpoint,” Distilled Spirits Council vice president Dale Szyndrowski said.

David Ozgo, an economist for the Distilled Spirits Council, said that in general, a 6 percent to 7 percent loss in sales volume can be expected for distilled spirits if Colorado voters give grocery stores the right to sell only beer and wine.

The bottom line, said Bill Ray, a local consultant running the Distilled Spirits Council’s campaign, is that the Council believes all three products should be sold at the same locations, regardless of where those might be.

“(Selling only beer and wine in grocery stores) will hurt consumer choice, and the grocery stores are campaigning in the name of helping consumer choice,” Ray said.

Liquor-store owners and many craft-beer breweries have opposed grocery-store beer and wine sales. Craft brewers, in particular, worry about their own access to market and their ability to gain shelf space in large chain grocery stores based out-of-state. Keep Colorado Local, a group spearheading the fight against such measures, didn’t comment specifically on the Distilled Spirits Council’s ballot measures on Wednesday, but is generally opposed to any changes to Colorado liquor laws.

“Our membership is opposed to any changes to Colorado’s current statutes because the current system successfully grows local businesses, including world-renowned craft beer, wine and liquor industries,” Ben Davis, a spokesman for Keep Colorado Local, said in an emailed statement. “In our opinion, growing grocery store profits is a poor reason to risk what we’ve built here in Colorado. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

As for Your Choice Colorado, the group pushing the beer and wine measure, is sticking by its decision to seek only beer and wine sales in grocery stores and not liquor.

“Having spoken with Coloradans around the state for months, Your Choice Colorado believes seeking the sale of only full strength beer and wine in neighborhood markets is what people want and that is what we intend to go to the ballot with in November,” Your Choice Colorado campaign manager Georgie Aguirre-Sacasa said in an email. “We’re pleased that others in Colorado’s adult beverage community are in agreement with what consumers have been saying for years — that Colorado’s laws are antiquated and changes benefiting the customer are necessary.”

The Distilled Spirits Council would need to gather some 98,000 signatures by early August for each of its ballot measures to have them included on the November ballot. Your Choice Colorado must do the same for its initiative.

If more than one of the measures passes, it could cloud the situation further. If two measures pass that are seen as competing, the one with the most votes in favor of it generally wins. But the issue of whether two passed measures are conflicting is often up for determination and could be sent by legislators to the Colorado Supreme Court for a decision. If they’re not seen as conflicting, it’s possible that both could go into effect, even if they have overlapping attributes.

The Distilled Spirits Council earlier this year said it was working to find Colorado lawmakers who would be willing to partner on changing the state’s liquor laws legislatively rather than at the ballot box. Those efforts haven’t come to fruition yet but are still ongoing, Szyndrowski said.

“But in order to pursue that you have to have partners that are willing to sit down and talk,” he said.