California liquor bill aims to make restaurant parklets permanent, plus zones for open containers
"As we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel with this vaccine, we need to help these small businesses recover," Wiener said in an interview. "Now's the time to make common-sense changes to our alcohol rules that tangibly support small businesses." [...]
The bill would make permanent some of the changes that have been temporarily allowed since the pandemic began, such as allowing restaurants to serve alcohol in outdoor spaces like parking lots and sidewalks. [...] Also, music venues would no longer need to have full kitchens to get liquor licenses. [...]
Some other emergency alcohol measures enacted during the pandemic, such as legalizing takeout and delivery cocktails from restaurants, are not addressed in this bill.
Like the previous attempts at changing our liquor laws (by Wiener and others before him) this rule change would be a change to state law that would allow municipalities to enact these changes if and only if they wanted.
As such, and as before, we can doubtless expect the fundamentalist, prohibitionists nutjobs to sing their usual chorus of: "I don't want this in my suburb, therefore you shouldn't be allowed to have it in your city, either."
