Among the scores of solutions outlined as part of the Everett Community Streets Initiative that are being implemented and given further study was the creation of alcohol impact areas within the city that would limit the sale of beverages that sell the punch of high alcohol content at low cost.
The single-serving bottles and cans of alcoholic drinks, with names such as Colt 45 High Gravity, Joose and Old English 800, are seen as contributing to the problems of addiction and alcoholism among the city’s homeless population and others. In turn, the city has had to deal with public inebriation, medical calls, littering, criminal mischief and theft.
The Everett City Council took a measured step in April by setting up the zones in central Everett and along Evergreen Way and specifying the products whose sale would be barred. Where a traditional lager such as Budweiser is about 5 percent alcohol, the beverages that most alcohol impact areas seek to address are in the range of 7 percent and higher.
But the decision in Everett to limit the sale of the beverages was left up to individual stores.
Voluntary compliance hasn’t been an overwhelming success. An Everett Police official reported to the city council last week that only 15 percent of the affected retailers complied with the ordinance, making it all but impossible to judge whether the impact areas were having any effect in reducing problems.
The Everett City Council is expected to have a first reading of an ordinance this evening that would request the state Liquor and Cannabis Board to make Everett’s impact areas mandatory. Action could follow at the council’s final meeting of the year on Dec. 30.
Judging by the experience of other cities in Washington state, Everett should seek to require the sales restrictions.
Seattle, which established alcohol impact areas in late 2006 in its central core, including Pioneer Square, and in the Wallingford neighborhood, saw a 35 percent drop between 2003 and 2008 in the number of police calls regarding drinking in public, and a 31 percent decrease in aid calls for a “person down,” according to a 2009 study by Washington State University’s Social and Economic Sciences Research Center. The study also found modest increases in the opinions of residents and retailers in the areas reporting perceived improvements in those neighborhoods, including decreased panhandling, fewer litter problems and an increase in public safety.
More recently, a study in 2014 of Spokane’s alcohol impact area found that after its restrictions went into effect in 2012, liquor violations decreased by 83 percent in 2013-14 and detox calls declined 53 percent.
There’s a reasonable concern that the zones could push the problems into areas that border them. A WSU study of Tacoma’s impact areas found that while alcohol-related complaints fell within the area by 36 percent, they increased 10 percent just outside the impact area. But the Seattle study found the opposite, that police service calls inside and outside the impact areas fell at similar rates.
Alcoholism is a disease. Limiting the easiest access to beverages that feed a disease of addiction is a reasonable response for a community.
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