Hesperia councilman proposes single-serve alcoholic beverage ban

Sometimes Hesperia City Councilman Russell Blewett parks his car outside liquor and grocery stores and sits there, watching for the drunks and panhandlers who make him so mad.

Blewett recently saw someone walk into a liquor store, “buy a can of booze, pop it and drive away,” he said. He’s seen people come out clutching a paper bag, thinking nobody knows what’s inside. And he said he gets complaints from “little old ladies” saying they’re harassed by inebriated men begging for beer money.

Blewett wants to make his San Bernardino County town safer, he said at a recent council meeting, “so that women can go to the grocery store and not be accosted by doggone bums.”

To do that, he’s proposed an ordinance that would ban single-serve alcoholic beverages — such as 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and single cans of beer — and declare them a public nuisance. The Hesperia City Council is expected to vote on the ordinance Tuesday.

Hesperia is one of a growing number of cities across the country talking about such bans as a way of reducing crime and public intoxication. Washington D.C. imposed a ban years ago, prompting protests from some grocery store owners who said it was unfair.

San Bernardino imposed a ban in 2010. Researchers at UC Riverside reviewed San Bernardino crime data and found areas with more liquor stores — including ones that devoted significant space to single-sale alcoholic beverages — had higher crime rate. They concluded banning single sales would reduce crime.

The Hesperia law would apply to establishments such as liquor or grocery stores selling alcohol for off-site consumption and would not apply to bars or restaurants where patrons buy beverages to drink on site. It would not apply to alcoholic drinks packaged together (such as six-packs of beer), bottles or containers of wine of at least 750 milliliters, or of containers of distilled spirits of at least 375 milliliters.

The proposal has drawn sharp criticism from liquor store owners who say they are being made the scapegoat for a problem with homelessness.

“The issue with homelessness and panhandling should not just be the responsibility of liquor store owners; it should be the responsibility of everybody,” said Azhar Alberre, the owner of Porgie’s Liquor on Main Street. “They say it’s a well line, that if you dry it up they’ll go somewhere else, but that’s not the solution.”

Alberre, who has owned Porgie’s with her husband for three decades, said the single-serve beverages are a big part of many stores’ sales and that the ordinance vilifies customers.

The proposal, she said, is an “eye-opener,” and she understands why the city wants to do something about panhandling. Several liquor store owners have been meeting recently to discuss solutions and how they can do their part, such as refusing to sell to customers who are obviously intoxicated.

In an interview, Blewett did not hide his disdain for liquor stores, saying there were too many in Hesperia.

“What they do is they rip off poor people, truthfully,” he said. “I’m not going to mince words. They basically take their products and double their price and sell them to people that aren’t smart enough to get to a grocery store.”

The councilman added that he “doesn’t care if people drink as long as they do it responsibly” and that he does not personally drink.

Other cities in San Bernardino County that have restricted sales of single-serve beverages include Victorville, where council members last year upheld the law despite an appeal from a business owner. Victorville’s law applied only to new businesses. The proposed Hesperia ordinance would include existing businesses.

At one recent Hesperia City Council meeting, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Capt. Nils Bentsen said the ban could help, saying that when alcohol is easily available, it perpetuates problems.

“The taxpayers of Hesperia spend a lot of money dealing with drunk, transient homeless people,” he said. He said he’s seen people drinking in liquor store parking lots. He mentioned one homeless man by name, saying he watched the man buy a drink from a liquor store then “get drunk and pass out in front of the senior center.”

One resident said she worried that banning single-serve drinks would only force people to steal them or to buy larger packages of drinks, getting “even drunker than normal.”

At the meeting, Christian Weathers, who works for a wine and spirit distributor, said he was disturbed by a paper with “some racial undertones” that was attached to the council ordinance correlating single-serve alcohol sales with gang crimes.

The paper says single-serve cans and bottles of beer “are very popular with youth including minorities, to whom these products are specifically marketed,” and that because they are priced low, they are more affordable “for young people who have less disposable income.”

The paper has photos of an African American rapper in a malt liquor commercial and of beer for sale in a store with limes next to it, noting that “since Hispanic customers prefer lemon [sic] with some types of beer, one San Bernardino store offers fresh lemons [sic] so that the product can be consumed immediately after purchase.”

Blewett said in an interview that the ordinance was not racially motivated.

“This was about homeless people,” he said. “This is a matter of what’s best for your community.... Those people in the liquor stores couldn’t care less about the community.”

hailey.branson@latimes.com