REGIONAL REPORT : Neighbors Scotching Alcohol Permits : Liquor: Homeowner groups are fighting stores’ sales permits--and their victories give retailers a bad case of the shakes.

A growing legion of neighborhood activists and local politicians, fed up with the level of alcohol sales, is on the march and retailers are on the defensive.

In response to claims of a link between concentrations of alcohol sellers and crime and blight, local governments throughout the region--including Los Angeles, San Diego and West Hollywood--have made it difficult or impossible for new stores in certain areas to get permits to sell alcohol.

Sales of some products, such as small bottles of fortified wine or single cans of cold beer, have been banned. And many locales now routinely require markets to cut off alcohol sales early, hire security guards and clean up graffiti before allowing the stores to operate.

Overseeing alcohol sales once was solely the responsibility of the notoriously understaffed Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Now, encouraged by state officials, local groups are taking matters into their own hands, largely by taking advantage of new local zoning ordinances that govern where--and how--businesses can operate.

“If we don’t put a line in the sand . . . over these stores our neighborhood will be gone, and we’ll have to live indoors and the streets will be given over to the morons,” said Edward M. Riney, who with his Norton Avenue neighbors last fall persuaded the West Hollywood City Council to overturn its decision to allow a 7-Eleven located near three liquor stores to sell beer and wine.

Such victories are occurring more frequently. In parts of San Diego, a group led by Cleo Malone, who heads a drug and alcohol treatment agency, is so organized that it has stopped 23 alcohol sellers from getting permits, Malone said. And as more communities lose their tolerance for alcohol consumption and the problems they say it causes, the activists figure to keep winning.

Retailers, meanwhile, are preparing to fight back in a battle that pits a neighborhood’s right to peace and quiet against a merchant’s right to sell a legal product.

Alcohol represents 25% to 35% of the average California convenience store’s annual sales of between $750,000 and $1 million, according to industry estimates. Denying a permit usually makes it impossible for a store to stay in business, industry officials said.

Merchants argue that stopping alcohol sales at one store makes little sense when the product is widely available. Adding one more alcohol vendor where others already are located does not add to community problems, they say.

They also charge that the activists usurp what is properly the responsibility of the state.

“They’re driving . . . the industry nuts doing that,” said Don Beaver, president of the 8,000-member California Grocers Assn. “Local officials don’t know what’s going on . . . and here they are deciding on someone who is trying to make a living.

“We have an image problem,” he acknowledged. “I’m not saying that there aren’t rotten apples out there that would sell beer to a 12-year-old if they could make a buck, but the vast majority of retailers . . . are honest and hard working.”

Said Joan Wilson, head of the governmental affairs office of the Southland Corp., which operates 7-Eleven stores: “We’re trying to say we’re the same little old business that’s always been there for you and alcohol is only one item we sell out of over 3,000.”

Not content to fight skirmishes with local groups at the often acrimonious public hearings required to get an operating permit, the grocers association is counterattacking with a public relations campaign dubbed the United Neighborhood Outreach Program. The campaign, which, among other elements, pledges participants not to break the law by selling alcohol to minors, will begin next month in six Northern California counties, Beaver said; if successful, it will be expanded statewide.

Participants in the association’s campaign will vow to clean up litter, start recycling programs, install bright exterior lights, discourage loitering and instruct clerks not to sell alcohol and tobacco to minors.

But many activists--particularly Ray Chavira, a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer who is on the board of the Alcohol Policies Project at the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest and is a former chairman of Americans for Substance Abuse Prevention--are looking on the campaign with a degree of skepticism. Chavira argues that the retailers are merely trying to avoid having stricter, mandatory rules imposed by the government.

The activists deny retailers’ charges that they are neo-Prohibitionists and say they are merely trying to preserve or improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

“These movements . . . are springing up in every community because they provide a forum for the community to participate in and haggle out that balance between quality of life and the public convenience” of buying alcoholic drinks close to home, said Angela Goldberg, chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Alcohol Policy Coalition, a policy analysis and substance abuse prevention group. “It’s not a question of legislating people’s rights away but rather initiating a community process where people can talk about it . . . at a very local level.”

One of the earliest ordinances requiring alcohol sellers to obtain a conditional use permit resulted from a push in the early 1980s by church groups in South-Central Los Angeles. They were seeking to halt additional alcohol sales in their already saturated neighborhoods. The idea spread to East Los Angeles, Willowbrook and Altadena.

Although most frequently used to block new outlets in poor and minority areas, such efforts encompass upscale enclaves and growing population centers too. Similar movements exist in such affluent areas as Santa Monica and Huntington Beach and in such fast-growing suburbs as parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. And in Lancaster and Palmdale, activists are pushing for a tough ordinance to control alcohol sales.

Stores selling alcohol still must get state licenses even in the estimated one-third of the cities and counties that require local permits. But state and local officials agree that the local permits can be a powerful, if mundane, tool to reduce alcohol sales.

“Nobody is saying that alcohol is bad, that people shouldn’t drink, but when there are numerous outlets it only . . . makes the problems worse,” said West Hollywood’s Riney, who boasts that he can turn out 100 people at nearly a moment’s notice to oppose any new takeout alcohol sales permits in his Norton Avenue area.

Other hotbeds of local anti-alcohol activism include:

* The Pacoima Coordinating Council and other groups in the northeast San Fernando Valley, which have conducted marches, rallies and other events to build opposition to new alcohol outlets.

* Riverside County, where an ordinance requiring operating permits for new bars, liquor stores and mini-markets went into effect last fall. “Everyone is selling liquor now, including the dairies,” said Rosanna Scott, a senior administrative assistant to Supervisor Melba Dunlap. “We expect it next at the baby-goods store, where you would buy Champagne to celebrate the birth of your children.”

* Recently incorporated communities such as Mission Viejo, which are particularly aggressive in using zoning to limit new alcohol outlets, according to Richard Cottingham, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control’s deputy division chief in Southern California.

* Such established cities as Santa Ana and Garden Grove, which use the ordinances to try to rejuvenate run-down parts of town, Cottingham said.

* The largely poor southeast section of San Diego, where in the last four years a Christian group blocked each of 23 requests for new operating permits by demonstrating how new alcohol outlets would hurt the minority community, Malone said.

“Unlike middle-class white communities where you have large food stores and there is a section along the side for liquor, in our communities what we have is large liquor stores and a section along the side for food,” Malone said.

In some areas, residents object to all types of permit requests. But in other places the focus is on permits to sell alcohol at mini-markets and gas stations--the types of outlets increasing the fastest.

Between 1986 and 1990, the number of liquor stores, mini-markets, bars and other types of businesses selling alcohol in Los Angeles County fell from 17,440 to 17,135, partly as a result of the difficulty and cost of getting operating permits, said Carl Faletta, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control’s deputy division chief for the county. With only about 25 state agents to monitor those outlets’ activities, Faletta and other department officials say they welcome the local interest in regulating alcohol sales.

One of the few setbacks to local restrictions occurred last year in Pacoima, where a large number of arrests near three liquor stores caused Los Angeles city officials to impose stringent rules--many of which were later thrown out in court.

Attorney Laurence Adelman represented the stores in their successful lawsuit. Since then, he said, he has heard from attorneys in similar fights all over the state. “It is like the old Prohibitionist attitude is being resurrected in the guise of zoning,” he said.

Convenience store owners scored a more recent victory earlier this month in San Diego, where store owner Jo Hardison led a successful effort to gather enough signatures to delay implementation of that city’s recently enacted ban on alcohol on its beaches.

“We felt the City Council was not in tune with the people,” she said. “They were listening to special interest groups, (such as) the people who live (near the beach).”

Friedner Wittman, a research scientist with the Berkeley-based Institute for the Study of Social Change, said local zoning ordinances that deal with alcohol have increased in importance in the last five years as money for other prevention approaches has dwindled. But zoning ordinances without community activism are toothless, he said.

“It’s critical . . . that (residents) become directly involved in the hearing process on a case-by-case basis,” said Wittman, who is helping groups in Pasadena, Escondido and elsewhere devise plans for reducing alcohol-related problems. “If the community doesn’t speak, then the city council is likely to take what the retailer says” as fact.