Owners fight to reopen Fresno store closed by fire. But are there too many liquor stores?
The owners of a central Fresno store damaged by a fire six years ago hopes to reopen soon, including offering beer, wine and hard liquor for sale.
But not everyone, including City Councilmember Miguel Arias, thinks it’s a good idea because the nearby neighborhood – which includes a pair of schools – is already “saturated” with stores also selling alcohol.
The Fresno City Council on Thursday voted to approve a land-use permit for owners Baldev and Jasjit Khela to rebuild and reopen their Circle D Food & Liquor store at the southeast corner of Olive Avenue and Fresno Street, including the owners’ desire to once again sell alcohol.
The council’s 6-1 vote, with Arias the lone, no, overturned the Fresno Planning Commission’s rejection earlier this year of the Khela family’s permit application, based in part on the location of six other stores within the same Census tract that already have off-sale licenses for alcohol – already over the limit of four off-sale licenses allowed in the neighborhood.
The city has leeway to authorize more stores in a census tract than what’s ordinarily allowed, if it can determine that more are needed in the interest of public necessity or convenience.
Thirteen additional stores located just outside the fringe of Census Tract 24 also have liquor licenses from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control – some selling only beer and wine, others selling distilled spirits in addition to beer and wine.
Dirk Poeschel, a consultant for the Khelas, said the delay of more than six years to reopen the business is the result of a dispute between the owners and their insurance company. In the interim, the Khelas had to surrender their state liquor license – a Type 21 license for sale of beer, wine and spirits to be consumed off the site – and also had to reapply to the city for permits under current rules for neighborhood markets.
The conditions for the city’s permit include limiting the store’s operating hours to 6 a.m. to midnight and not selling vape, pipes and other smoking paraphernalia beyond cigarettes and tobacco products.
The operational statement submitted by the family also states that no magazines of any kind, including adult magazines, will be sold at the store. They also state that rather than operating as a convenience store, the product mix will be that of a general grocery market with beverages, dairy products, baked goods, deli foods, nonperishable canned, boxed or packaged foods, a hot food area, over-the-counter non-prescription medications, first aid, diapers and baby products, and fresh produce.
In a memo to City Manager Georgeanne White, Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto said that based on data for calls for service in the surrounding area, the Circle D store is “not located in an area that would be detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of persons located in the area.”
Additionally, Casto wrote, the store “would not increase the severity of existing law enforcement or public nuisance problems in the area.”
One of the key issues that arose Thursday was the number of alcohol-selling licenses in the surrounding area. Three of the six licensees within the census tract have Type 20 licenses to sell beer and wine, while the other three have Type 21 licenses for beer, wine and spirits.
An additional concern is that two Fresno Unified School District campuses – Webster Elementary School and Tehipite Middle School – are located in the same census tract. Webster Elementary is about 900 feet southeast of the Circle D location, while the middle school is about 1,800 feet away to the southeast.
Several speakers from the Youth Leadership Institute addressed the City Council on Thursday to implore them to deny the appeal by the Khelas based on worries that it would increase exposure of students and young people to alcohol.
But neighbors of the store urged the city to allow the family to rebuild their store.
Dez Martinez, an advocate for homeless residents in the Fresno area, told councilmembers that she and other neighbors relied on the store for about 30 years before the fire forced it to close in 2018.
“Any individual in the neighborhood that was hungry could go there and they would feed them; if you were thirsty, they would give them something to drink,” Martinez said. “You guys don’t understand how many people they’ve helped over the years. When it burned down, we were upset. The whole neighborhood was mad. You can’t take that store from us.”
Even with the city’s approval Thursday, before the Khelas can sell alcohol and under the terms of Fresno’s city codes, they will have to obtain two licenses from Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control: one for their own operation, and other to be retired to serve the city’s goal of reducing the overall number of businesses selling alcohol in Fresno.
“He’s got to start from scratch,” Poeschel said. “He has to go buy those licenses just to get one. (The state) is going to have a lottery, and he could try to buy one through that. … It’s very expensive, by the way.” So far, Poeschel added, the Khelas have not lined up a seller for an existing license.
Arias asked why the Khelas could not open without selling alcohol – a step that would negate the need for a new conditional permit from the city. Poeschel said that even though beer, wine and liquor will represent less than 2% f the roughly 3,000-square-foot store, alcohol sales are necessary for the business to be a success.
“There’s a very, very thin margin on the food products that are sold and other things that are sold,” Poeschel said. “Alcohol, in contrast, has a relatively high profit margin. So you could sell much less of alcohol, but make much more because of the per-sale profit.”
Across the greater Fresno-Clovis area, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control reports there are nearly 600 licenses for businesses to sell alcohol. That doesn’t count hundreds more licenses for restaurants, bars, taverns or nightclubs where drinks are sold and consumed on the premises.
The abundance of booze businesses is one factor that Arias contended distinguish Fresno as having more liquor licenses per capita than any other California city, even as the city seeks to reduce the number of licenses. “I fear today’s decision is going to take us backwards to the days where every liquor store that came forward was approved no matter what.”
City planners said that because Fresno passed its Responsible Neighborhood Market Act, which bars the sale of single containers of alcohol – single cans or bottles of beer or single serving-sized mini bottles of hard liquor – in 2022, there are 23 fewer off-sale liquor licenses in the city as new businesses comply with requirements to buy and retire existing licenses.
This story was originally published September 13, 2024 at 11:01 AM.
