‘The brewers have oversold their products. We have to put the message out that you cannot drive your car and drink beer.’ : 5 Cities Consider Banning Mini-Mart Gas-Beer Stops

Heading home from his Santa Ana office, Dave Larson often stops at a gasoline station mini-mart, where he can conveniently buy gas, a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk. Larson also could easily reach into a barrel full of ice and pull out a cold bottle of beer.

But Larson, executive director of the National Council on Alcoholism’s Orange County Chapter, doesn’t want to see that barrel loaded with beer propped next to the cash register. And neither do many other people.

Concerned that the joint sale of liquor and gasoline could increase drunk driving accidents, several cities in the county are considering banning alcohol sales at gasoline station convenience stores. Opponents of such bans, however, say they are arbitrary and that critics have no data to back them.

“It’s a knee-jerk reaction and a violation of the people’s rights,” Yorba Linda Mayor Gene Wisner said. “Any time we try to legislate people’s actions, we get into trouble. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense . . . . You would have to close down all the places you know they are going to pop open a beer and drive home. “

Yorba Linda is one of at least five Orange County cities gearing up to vote on ordinances that would prohibit the sale of alcohol and gas at the same location. Anaheim is scheduled to vote Sept. 10. Officials in San Juan Capistrano, Westminster and Brea are considering proposing similar ordinances.

In Orange County, most cities require gas station owners to apply for conditional use permits if they want to sell alcohol. Fountain Valley, Newport Beach, Orange and Seal Beach already prohibit the sale of beer and wine at gas stations. And in several cities, such as Tustin, Planning Commission members traditionally have denied their applications.

“The brewers have oversold their products,” said Larson, a Tustin resident. “We have to put the message out that you cannot drive your car and drink beer. And there isn’t anybody in the world that will convince me that those cold cans of beer aren’t there to not pop down and drink in the car.”

But in Anaheim, where the Planning Commission usually denies requests to sell alcohol at gas stations and council members have reversed those decisions on appeal, Mayor pro tem Ben Bay said he didn’t expect his colleagues are “ready to carte blanche say no” to the mini-mart stations.

Bay and Mayor Don Roth are among many who say they have yet to see evidence that the joint sale of beer and gas leads to an increase of alcohol-related crashes.

“I want to deal with the facts instead of emotions and innuendoes,” Roth said.

Friedner Wittman , a researcher with the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, said, “It’s not an emotional thing at all. . . . The question is: ‘How much availability is there?’ It’s a perfectly reasonable public health question to ask.”

Every community, “uses its zoning ordinances to shape its values and norms,” said Wittman, whose research center is one of nine in the country financed by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

ARCO Report Questioned

“It’s important that communities begin to look at the overall number of alcohol outlets they have and begin asking how many do we need for people’s convenience . . . and to what extent are patterns of availability in excess of public convenience and needs.”

Wittman questioned whether a report by ARCO Petroleum Products Co., which states only 10% of ARCO customers buy both food and gasoline, applies to all gasoline mini-marts. According to ARCO spokesman Don Davis, less than 3% of ARCO’s customers buy alcohol and gasoline at the same time. Soft drinks and candy are the biggest sellers, he said.

In a study in the cities of Davis and Berkeley, the research center found 15% to 30% of the stations’ customers stopped to fill up their tanks and pick up a six-pack or bottle of wine, Wittman said. “Impulse purchasing,” partially prompted by “neon beer signs” contributed to sales, Wittman said.

Phoenix Survey

Wittman conceded he does not have statistics to link mini-mart sales and drunk-driving accidents. “That’s a little bit like asking what is the contribution of a particular brand of cigarettes to lung cancer rates,” he said.

In a Phoenix, Ariz., survey released in April, police concluded that while the number of “injury accidents has risen dramatically along with the blood-alcohol content of those being arrested,” approximately 45% of the people involved had been drinking at bars. Another 18% had been drinking at home, 14% at friends’ homes and about 24% at miscellaneous locations. Of the 24%, none of the arrest reports mentioned a convenience store.

Larson doesn’t believe it. As a retired lieutenant of 27 years with the California Highway Patrol, he said he has seen his fill of alcohol-related crashes. Alcohol sales at mini-marts contribute to the statistics, he said.

“When do we, as a society, say enough of this--enough. We don’t want gasoline sold where beer is sold. We don’t want that,” Larson said.

Duffy’s Legislation

Northern California Assemblywoman Jean M. Duffy (D-Citrus Heights) wants to say “enough” with a bill that would prevent the state from issuing or renewing liquor licenses to businesses that sell gasoline. The bill is expected to come before the Assembly in January, an aide to Duffy said last week.

Ken Kelly, district administrator in the Santa Ana office of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, said the department does not consider whether a business applying for a liquor license also sells gasoline, unless local law forbids the joint sale.

In Orange County, the four cities that prohibit the joint sale of alcohol and gasoline made their laws for different reasons.

In Newport Beach, planning administrator Bill Laycock said, “It had nothing to do with liquor. We just didn’t want any other commercial use at a service station.”

Ban in Orange

Orange banned new gasoline/mini-marts in 1982, City Manager William Little said, because “They called them stop and rob . . . stop, leave the motor running, grab a six-pack and take off.” Orange City Atty. Furman B. Roberts said a local gasoline station sued the city when officials denied it a conditional use permit. The gas station lost its appeal in district court, he said. Shortly after, council members instituted the ordinance, Roberts said, because they questioned “why . . . every place in the world that sells products like gasoline (has) to have a place where you can purchase . . . alcoholic beverages.”

In Fullerton, city officials recently considered a similar ban but the issue died for a lack of interest from the public. “The citizenry in Fullerton did not seem to be up in arms about it,” Fullerton Planning Commission member Susan Zepeda said.

“As a parent living in Fullerton, I was concerned that it increased the availability of alcohol,” she said. Of Fullerton’s 52 service stations, 16 are mini-marts. Seven of the 16 were approved last year, according to a staff report.

Anaheim City Council member Miriam Kaywood said she shares Zepeda’s concerns.

“Youngsters under the age of 21 are able to get the beer very easily” from a teen-age employee or an adult “who buys it for them,” Kaywood said. “It’s a hangout.”

“There may be or not be absolute evidence that it encourages drunk driving, but it would seem logical that by making it available it certainly has that propensity,” Kaywood said.