BETHEL -- When voters in the city of Bethel six years ago agreed to become a "wet" community, they weren't trying to open the way to liquor stores and bars but rather wanted to free themselves of the state's close watch, said a leader of the 2009 campaign.
Now Western Alaska's biggest community is immersed in a bitter fight that promises to stretch at least through October over what would be its first liquor store in four decades. Bethel Native Corp., in an effort to resurrect its new retail center after the rapid failure of a grocery store there, has applied to the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board for a package store license.
Bethel city leaders are reeling from a July 1 decision by the board to reject the city's protest of that application, which if upheld would have killed the project for now. But the board also didn't approve the application.
"We're in the middle of it still," said Cynthia Franklin, ABC Board director. "It's not over."
The debate over the proposed Bethel Spirits store turns to alcohol-fueled damage in rural Alaska: rapes and beatings, killings and suicides, risky river trips and children left to scramble for themselves. The problems are already are here through illegal sales, liquor store backers say. The problems will get worse, opponents counter.
Both sides bring up the lawlessness from dual troubles of homebrew and bootlegging. Both sides talk about Bethel's odd position, with individuals allowed to bring in vast amounts of alcohol through Bush orders, checked luggage and shipments from friends in urban centers -- all in a place with no legal sales. More than 1,000 bottles came into Bethel, a community of about 6,000, in one 90-day stretch this year just from the biggest Bush orders, a small portion of the total.
Yet another idea also is emerging: that some people drink every bottle dry because they never had the chance to learn responsible social drinking.
Two key events are set for October. Bethel voters will be asked to consider anew the question of legal sales in an advisory vote set for the Oct. 6 municipal election. And the ABC Board has agreed to a public hearing in Bethel on continued objections to the liquor store. The hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Oct. 22.
Some 24 individuals and community groups including the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. have opposed the store. Many cited public safety.
Legal wrangling
In pushing for its store, Bethel Native Corp. collected about 500 letters of support, and while most were form letters, that's evidence sentiment may have shifted in only a few short years, backers said. That's almost the same number who voted against the idea of a liquor store or bar during the last advisory vote, in 2010, said the corporation's attorney, Philip Blumstein.
Not so fast, say Bethel City Council members. The matter is complex. Attitudes may have turned, but no one will know for sure until the new October advisory vote, said Zach Fansler, a council member who also is an attorney. Testimony at multiple, lengthy Bethel public hearings has been emotional -- and overwhelmingly against a liquor store.
The ABC Board split 3-2 in rejecting the city protest as "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable," the grounds specified in state law. Some on the board had to request definitions of "arbitrary" and "capricious" and were told there wasn't good case law on that, said Fansler, who listened to the meeting at City Hall with a small group of city officials.
The council is in a position to know what residents want, not the state board, said Fansler and another council member, Vice Mayor Leif Albertson.
"Overreach," Fansler said. The board is treating a council decision based on hours of testimony and debate as nothing more than "a personal whim," he said.
Yet, Fansler said, his personal preference would be to allow a liquor store.
"It's insulting, quite honestly," he said. "I would not mind being able to go have a beer while I was eating dinner or being able to purchase alcohol here in Bethel."
At a town hall meeting in Bethel back in April, Franklin, the ABC Board director, told the crowd that a City Council protest was the community's most powerful tool. The board upheld all six protests of alcohol licenses from the city in 2010, she noted.
Now the council has seen that tool shelved. Franklin said she didn't have a way to determine whether that was unusual. The board's record on protests doesn't have its own tracking system.
Bethel Native Corp. says since Bethel is legally wet, with votes in both 2009 and 2010, the city's policy of objecting to every applicant for a liquor license is contrary to state law.
The local options in law include a total ban on alcohol, a ban on sales with limits on possession, and a provision for a city-run liquor store, but they don't provide for unlimited amounts of alcohol and no sales, Blumstein, said in a seven-page letter to the ABC Board.
"The City Council may not lawfully create its own 'local option' merely because it disagrees with the local options provided by statute," he wrote.
A limit on beer
But that was the idea behind the 2009 vote, backers said. It came from citizens fed up with restrictions on damp communities and alarmed over a proposal by the administration of then-Gov. Sarah Palin to cut the amounts residents could bring in.
"There was a mild threat by the governor to limit us to two cases of beer a month," said Tom Hawkins, a Bethel resident since 1978 and one of the leaders of the movement to free Bethel from local option restrictions on damp communities. "That was the straw that broke the camel's back."
Some residents also were concerned that someone providing alcohol to an underage person could face a felony -- even a teenager who gave a bottle to another kid. That offense would be a misdemeanor in a wet community. Bootlegging was a felony too, while in wet communities, selling without a license is a misdemeanor.
The change to wet erased limits on what an individual could import as well as requirements that even small amounts be reported to the state, though large Bush orders still must be logged.
The goal was never sales, Hawkins said.
"That was explained to every person our group tried to elicit to our cause, that we were not for a liquor store," Hawkins said. In fact, he and other backers organized a letter-writing campaign against the first applicants for liquor licenses after the 2009 vote.
This time around, Hawkins isn't fighting Bethel Native Corp. but still doesn't want easy access to alcohol at a liquor store.
The real problem, as he sees it, is lax law enforcement in dealing with bootleggers.
Battling bootleggers
Liquor stores in urban areas must notify the ABC Board of who is making big Bush orders, those that top 36 liters in a single week, and the board turns that information over to Alaska State Troopers.
Troopers look for patterns including frequent travel to villages or repeat large orders, said Trooper Sgt. Kevin Blanchette, who oversees the 11-person Western Alaska Alcohol and Narcotics Team.
"Just because a person is on that list with a high quantity doesn't mean they are selling it," the sergeant said. "Even if it's several hundred liters, that in and of itself is not enough for a prosecutable case."
Troopers sort through hundreds of tips but most don't lead anywhere. They still make more cases than people may realize. Since January 2014, 59 people have been charged in alcohol importation cases investigated by WAANT investigators based in Bethel, among 187 charged across Western Alaska, from Nome to Dillingham, Kotzebue to Kodiak, and including cases out of the Anchorage airport, according to troopers. But most of the arrests and alcohol seizures in Bethel concerned bootlegging to villages, not within Bethel.
Bethel police don't even ask to see the list of large Bush orders, said Chief Andre Achee.
"The main reason why is it's not illegal to get alcohol here," he said. When Bethel was damp, people didn't like having to report their alcohol purchases to the state. "People have a right to be concerned when they have that impression that Big Brother is watching them."
The Bush orders shipped directly to Bethel from urban package stores may not even be the main source of illegal alcohol, Achee said. His small police force doesn't have the manpower to devote to misdemeanor bootlegging investigations, he said.
Alcohol has been a problem in Bethel whether the community is wet, damp or dry, the police chief said. One third of the nearly 10,000 calls to Bethel police in 2014 were for "intoxicated pedestrians" and most of the total calls were alcohol-related.
Safe way to drink?
Some say it's time to test legal sales. Bootleggers sell hard liquor, usually cheap R & R whiskey in plastic fifths that sell for $50 and up in Bethel, more in villages.
People might behave differently if they had a chance to buy beer when they wanted it, if they learned to drink a little at a time without worry of where the next bottle was coming from, Mark Leary, a Bethel Search and Rescue volunteer, said in a letter to the ABC Board in support of a two-year trial liquor license.
Ana Hoffman, chief executive officer of Bethel Native Corp., has talked about that too.
At the town hall meeting in April, she said the current arrangement perpetuated abusive habits.
"It is time for our community to mature and no longer be crippled by paternalistic mentalities," Hoffman said. "We manage our lives in the most challenging of environments. We can handle a liquor store in Bethel. And the area villages can handle it too."
She said she was recently asked whether Alaska Native people are predisposed to addiction. Her answer was she couldn't change her genetics, or those of her sons.
"Their genes are set," Hoffman said at the town hall. "But what I can do is provide my boys with the tools to live in their surroundings and then it will up to each one of them to decide how he will live his life."
The matter is now before the ABC Board. Hoffman said the corporation respects the board process. The board could make a decision when it comes to Bethel or after that, Franklin said.