Sobering news: Boise River restaurants won’t be getting liquor law carve-out, after all
Treasure Valley residents craving a cocktail by the Boise River may be distressed to learn that the Legislature has left them high and dry.
A bill that would have made it easier for restaurants and hotels along the river to obtain liquor licenses failed to make it through the Legislature in the 2024 session after a House committee chairperson declined to give it a hearing.
The bill aimed to broaden the definition of waterfront resorts, a category of business that receives a special carve-out from the state’s liquor-licensing process. It would have lowered the bar on how much water must flow through a river for the properties along it to be considered “waterfront.” If passed, the bill would have affected properties along the Boise River corridor, including in Garden City and Boise.
House State Affairs Committee Chairman Brent Crane, a Nampa Republican, said the bill was just one more in a long line of requested carve-outs to the state’s restrictive liquor laws.
“We’ve got to stop at some point,” he told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “You can’t just keep hiring lobbyists to come down the Legislature and say, ‘Hey, well, we need an exemption for this,’ and ‘Hey, we need an exemption for that.’”
He highlighted a major 2023 reform to the state’s liquor laws that aimed to eliminate the secondary market for license sales that has flourished because of the state’s grip on how many liquor permits each city can have. The new law banned selling or leasing liquor licenses, though owners of existing licenses could transfer their licenses one time after the law took effect. The goal was to shift away from a system of reselling licenses that has given them “obscene value,” Sen. Jim Guthrie, R-McCammon, told the Statesman at the time.
“We need to let that settle and see how that works,” Crane said. “When you keep having these carve-outs, it’s undermining the original law that was passed in ‘23.”
Garden City Mayor John Evans, a vocal supporter of the bill, expressed disappointment about its failure but said he hoped it would contribute to a broader conversation about shortcomings in the state’s approach to providing liquor licenses.
The state uses a quota system to distribute licenses based on population, with one liquor license per 1,500 residents in a city. With licenses tightly restricted, some have found that their best bet is to seek exemptions to the law’s limitations. In the 2024 legislative session, a separate bill passed that created a carve-out for Idaho’s resort cities — which have small populations and economies that depend heavily on tourism. That bill allowed resort cities to add three licenses for restaurants that could show that most of their revenue came from food sales.
“The quota system that’s been in place for years, it just doesn’t work very well,” Evans told the Statesman by phone. “You start with what-ifs, and there’s always a lot of what-ifs.”
Evans had previously expressed optimism that the waterfront bill, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Nichols, a Republican from Middleton, would bring economic benefits to Garden City, which has a small population but extensive river frontage.
But “the business community’s resilient; they find a way to make things work” even without the bill, he said. “My hope is that it’s another beacon of light that says we really need to take a comprehensive look at the way we deal with liquor licenses.”
This story was originally published June 9, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
