Some bars and restaurants that got in trouble for breaking state government COVID-19 shutdown orders are still being hounded by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB).
Now, some state lawmakers have a message for liquor regulators: “Stand back!”
Bills recently introduced in the state House and Senate would extend amnesty to bars, restaurants and other establishments with liquor licenses that may have accumulated COVID-era violations. Specifically, the bills would prohibit the PLCB from revoking or suspending any liquor license due to failure to comply with COVID-19 orders from the state governor and the Department of Health, and would force the PLCB to remove any disciplinary actions already taken against the licensees. .
The bill collection is a response to the PLCB’s practice of imposing “conditional licensing agreements” on establishments that ran afoul of Pennsylvania’s strict lockdown rules during the pandemic.
AS Reason previously reported, some of these violations involved minor crimes. A York County tavern has been cited multiple times by PLCB agents for things as innocuous as allowing a band to use the bar’s power supply for an outdoor concert and a private indoor gathering at a time when bars had to be closed to the public. When the owners of that tavern tried to renew their license with the PLCB last year, they were forced to sign a conditional licensing agreement that resulted in higher insurance premiums and carries the risk of losing their license in the event of a ‘another violation.
“The Liquor Control Board has an opportunity to move on from the one-sided and subjective rules in place during the pandemic that has destroyed lives and livelihoods, especially our locally owned businesses, but appears intent on putting questioning the past that will continue to make these small businesses suffer even more,” said state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-York), a co-sponsor of one of the bills Reason. Senate President Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland) signed on to support Phillips-Hill’s proposal, a signal that it could pass quickly through the Republican-controlled chamber.
Before the pandemic, the PLCB used conditional licensing agreements to crack down on nuisance bars or establishments with a history of selling to underage customers. Since January 2022, however, the board has approved dozens of conditional licensing agreements based solely on COVID-era violations. “People who have violated the governor’s mandates and orders should face some consequences,” Mary Isenhour, one of three PLCB board members, said at a January 2022 meeting where the first of these was approved agreements.
At a hearing last month, Phillips-Hill criticized PLCB leadership for the board’s handling of COVID-era violations.
“The dilemma that we have faced is that the majority of licensees in the Commonwealth have adhered to the rules and have sacrificed their income, in some cases they have sacrificed their businesses,” PLCB President Tim Holden said in response. “How is this fair to the institutions that play by the rules… versus the establishment that ignored everything and continued to function?”
This is, in all honesty, a bit of a difficult question. But it ignores some important facts, like the minor violations that have landed some bars in trouble with the PLCB, and the reality of Pennsylvania’s COVID-19 lockdowns, which have been among the strictest in the country and led to the passage of a state constitutional amendment. deprive the executive of some emergency powers.
State Rep. Russ Diamond (R-Lebanon) says the amnesty effort is necessary for the state and its residents to get through a dark period. In addition to granting amnesty to bars and other establishments with liquor licenses, he introduced a similar bill granting amnesty to all professions governed by state licensing boards.
“Society is suffering from a collective form of PTSD as a result of heavy-handed government-imposed Covid mitigation efforts,” Diamond said Reason. Amnesty projects, she says, are “the least we can do to help heal those lingering wounds and move forward as a healthy society.”
Four years into the pandemic, public officials can benefit from hindsight and a lot of information that may have been missed during the chaotic days of March 2020. Ordering businesses to close never made much sense, but continuing to punish the businesses that managed to survive the crisis The pandemic (and the government’s response to it) helps no one.
Even Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat elected to that office in 2022 after defending Pennsylvania’s COVID lockdown orders in court when he was the state’s attorney general, has admitted that officials “got it wrong” in the early days of the pandemic. For everyone’s sake, it seems better to recognize that mistakes have been made, not continue to apply the wrong rules.
“I firmly believe that we must stop imposing unilateral shutdowns,” Phillips-Hill says, “just as voters decided to do when they amended their state constitution nearly three years ago.”