NORTHAMPTON — While four Northampton restaurants await over-quota, all-alcohol licenses approved Thursday by the Massachusetts Senate, reactions to the added licenses are mixed.
Some see the potential addition of the licenses as a positive development for business downtown, while other license holders say the change, if OK’d by Gov. Charlie Baker, would wipe out their competitive advantage in a tough business climate.
If Baker signs bill, which the House already passed, the licenses will be awarded to Ibiza Tapas, Local Burger, Sierra Grille and Sylvester’s. All but Local Burger already have wine and malt licenses, but full alcohol licenses would allow them to serve hard alcohol.
Each of the four will need to pay the city $10,000 for a license, while other restaurateurs have paid as much as six figures for them.
When asked for reaction Friday, Jeremiah Micka, owner of Tunnel Bar, Platform Sports Bar and Union Station, likened the licensing scenario to the buying of houses.
“How would that make you feel,” he asked, if “you bought your house for $150,000, and the state came and gave away four houses down the street for free?”
“It’s that simple,” Micka added. “That’s my competitive advantage, and now my competitive advantage is gone.”
Micka said the additional licenses compound an already difficult climate for city restaurants struggling with tight margins.
“It’s one more reason we consider it a hostile environment in Northampton right now,” he said. “This is a nickel-and-dime business — if you’re not paying attention, you could be out of it pretty quickly.”
Claudio Guerra, owner of Spoleto, Mama Iguanas and Pizza Paradiso — the first two of which are all-alcohol establishments — said he is leery about additional licenses watering down the market, but “four more shouldn’t change the playing field too much.”
“I have no problem with them doing four more,” Guerra said. “As long as it’s not an unlimited amount and ours become worthless, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Mayor David J. Narkewicz said the problem is the development of a system in which “licenses are bought and sold like commodities.”
Referring to the six-figure cost of some licenses, Narkewicz said, “While I hear that concern, it’s part of a larger policy issue and a system that’s grown up that I think is really not a good licensing model.”
Narkewicz said the four establishments were chosen to get the new licenses because they stepped forward in the lottery process that landed Bistro Les Gras its all-alcohol license in October 2014.
That lottery process illustrated the arbitrary nature of the current statewide system, he added.
“They all were deemed to be suitable candidates, but there was only one license,” he said. “I think that’s emblematic of how the process is really kind of broken.”
Narkewicz said he is glad that Northampton has support in leaders including Senate President Stanley Rosenberg, D-Amherst, who agrees that local municipalities should be in charge of the number of liquor licenses granted, rather than the state Legislature.
“This is a vestige of our Puritan days putting the state in the position of telling the children what to do,” Rosenberg said Thursday.
Baker supports giving municipal officials more control over licenses. The first-term Republican has included a provision in a municipal modernization bill that would allow the state’s 351 cities and towns to set their own quotas for liquor licenses issued to bars and restaurants that want on-premises drinking.
According to the State House News Service, Baker argues that the quota is archaic and stifles growth in commercial districts that are just starting to rebound from the recession.
“We view liquor licenses as an economic development tool,” Lt. Gov. Karen Polito told State House News. “We want to eliminate the cap and give communities the ability to use licenses to attract developers to their downtowns.”
But the bill hinges on legislative approval, and so far Baker’s pitch to change the rules hasn’t gained much traction.
O’Brian Tomalin, owner of Sierra Grille and a vocal advocate for making more liquor licenses available to Northampton establishments, said that the $10,000 price tag — while not in his budget— sounds a whole lot better than the $128,000 he previously considered paying for a license.
“We’re totally psyched,” said Tomalin, adding that customers should soon see bourbons, scotches and scratch cocktails at his restaurant. “It won’t take long for us to get going.”
Though the city retains the four additional licenses in any case, they would be linked specifically to those four specific businesses and are nontransferable, according to the legislation. In the event one of the four restaurants is sold, closed or has their license revoked, the legislation stipulates that it be returned to the city, which would then decide who would get it.
The city already has nine over-quota licenses — the four additional licenses, if approve by the governor, would mean Northampton has 13 more than the state-set quota of 30 licenses.
Narkewicz and other proponents for more municipal control of liquor licenses say that the population-based cap does not take into account downtown destinations like Northampton, where neighbors come from surrounding communities to drink and dine.
“It’s an antiquated law,” Narkewicz said. “It’s a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter law and it really has outgrown its usefulness.”
Narkewicz said newly approved casinos like the one slated for Springfield operate outside the quota system, and therefore it’s time to adjust.
“There’s a multimillion-dollar casino opening 20 minutes down the road,” he said. “And the fact that they can do that without being subject to the quota system, and here in Northampton we’re bound by it — I just don’t think that’s a level playing field.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.