Three first-year Tulsa legislators spent Friday at liquor stores, but it wasn’t because Capitol shenanigans have already driven them to drink.
It was because they just didn’t know how to vote on a measure that would affect how retailers — as well as bars and restaurants — get their alcoholic beverages.
“I’m a social studies teacher,” said Rep. John Waldron, D-Tulsa. “I don’t know any of this stuff.”
Neither did his colleagues, Melissa Provenzano and Denise Brewer, both Democrats. So the three decided to spend their Friday going to liquor stores and asking the owners and managers for advice.
“What I knew (about the subject), I knew from my college and high school days waiting tables in the Interurban in Norman,” said Brewer.
But getting elected to the Legislature makes people instant experts on just about everything.
People are also reading…
At least, that’s the expectation.
One day you’re a school teacher or insurance agent or retired law officer, and the next you’re supposed to make intelligent decisions on things like how much opioids people should be allowed and whether the Oklahoma Highway Patrol should be allowed to ticket mopeds in city limits.
What’s been called alcohol law modernization turned out to be particularly complex. It started, basically, with a simple desire to allow cold beer in liquor stores and wine in groceries. In the course of unwinding 60 years or more of law and constitutional provisions, though, alcohol modernization became much broader than most Oklahomans realized.
And certainly broader than the three first-year lawmakers realized.
They discovered this after Senate Bill 608, by Sen. Kim David, R-Porter, was re-written in a House committee in an attempt to roll back provisions of alcohol modernization dealing with the relationship between wholesalers and “manufacturers” — that is, the people who make and market wine and spirits.
Under old law, manufacturers had to make their products available to all licensed wholesalers, and the price of those products to retailers was set by a bidding process. So all wholesalers had access to the same products and sold them at the same price.
Under new law, manufacturers decide which wholesalers they use. The idea was to eliminate a distribution tier and lower prices, but a lot of retailers, restaurants and bars say that isn’t what’s happened.
They say prices have gone up, customer service has declined and there’s less competition than ever.
SB 608 would require manufacturers to make the top 25 products available to all wholesalers. The state’s two largest wholesalers, who now control the top brands, and their national partners oppose the measure. The state’s third largest wholesaler, who says he’s being squeezed out of the market, supports it.
The three legislators said most of the retailers they visited Friday do, too.
“They believe increased competition would lead to better service,” said Provenzano.
Lobbyists from both sides have besieged lawmakers, the three said. In some ways, that confused them all the more.
“The reason we did all of this is because there’s been such intense lobbying,” said Brewer. “We decided to escape the lobbying and go to the people on the ground. We want to handle these bills in the way our constituents want us to.”
A former educator, Provenzano said she went on one of these self-guided fact-finding tours earlier this session to find out how a “clean air” bill would affect a cigar store in her district.
“The owner said it would put him out of business,” Provenzano said. “Everybody wants ‘clean air’ ... but I don’t want to put people out of business.”
