Newport is working to modernize areas of the city related to alcohol enforcement.
At its meeting on April 21, the city held a lengthy conversation on two topics related to alcohol establishments in Newport. The first concerns a rule from the 1970s requiring employees of any establishment serving alcohol to have a bar ID.
The other conversation concerns the city’s extended hours license, which would allow businesses serving alcohol to stay open until 2:30 a.m. instead of 1 a.m.
The city did not vote on any legislation during the meeting; it was engaged in conversations to tweak legislation before it went before the commission to vote on.
Newport is only one of three Kentucky cities requiring a bar ID. The card cost is $45, which the city has heard can burden these establishments that spend money on IDs for employees throughout the year, who don’t work out. Newport proposes changing that law to a roster format and requiring Server Training in Alcohol Regulations, better known as STAR training.
The purpose the IDs serve today is to allow the police or the alcoholic beverage control, also referred to as ABC, administration to know who is supposed to be in a bar at any given time, especially after hours when shutting down operations.
“The issue is, if there’s no way to identify that you belong here, then they’re all the same story, ‘Oh, he works here. He’s helping out. He’s a janitor.’ Whatever that is,” Newport City Manager John Hayden said.
However, Hayden said the IDs don’t benefit the city much. He said they require two appointments and take a lot of staff time to assemble. The IDs also have to be renewed every two years for $35.
The proposal for a roster would only require the establishment owner to email the ABC officer an updated roster as they make staff changes and send a roster with their quarterly alcohol regulatory fee.
“That way, if an officer comes in, we should have the most updated list that doesn’t require a whole lot of effort on anybody’s part, and it’s easy record keeping for us,” Hayden said.
Blaze Cigar Lounge and Bar Owner Dallas Seagraves spoke at the meeting and said he would love to see the bar IDs gone, and the roster was a good solution.
Hayden said the new proposed change that would benefit the city is requiring anyone touching alcohol in a business to go through STAR training.
The three-year training course costs $40 per employee but can be completed within 90 days of employment. This four-hour video can be paused and worked on at the employee’s convenience. The city said that if all employees complete STAR training, many insurance carriers will offer a discount on their insurance costs.
“This would create an educational piece that I think is a benefit to us, and it also still continues to accomplish the same goal, as far as making sure that we know who the folks in the bars are all the time,” Hayden said.
Newport Commissioner Mike Radwanski said he was happy to see the city revisiting the topic because he didn’t think the city should take more money out of someone’s paycheck.
“If nobody else is doing it, why are we?” Radwanski said. “Historically, we’ve always been kind of timid about Monmouth Street. We’ve been timid about the business that we have in our city. We have to start taking a progressive step forward.”
Newport Commissioner Aaron Sutherland agreed with Radwanski, calling the bar ID “unacceptable.”
“This is the only city I ever came to where I had to pay to get a job, and that to me, it’s unacceptable,” he said.
Sutherland also said he thought it was a significant request on behalf of the businesses to recertify in the STAR training every three years.
“If you’ve been trained and you know how to bartend, we’re going to make you go back and do this all over and over and over again,” Sutherland said. “I think that at some point, you have to cut that off.”
Hayden said if the city starts giving carve-outs like that, it will take a lot of staff time to figure that out. He said they are also trying to make the rules as straightforward as possible.
Newport Vice Mayor Julie Smith Morrow said she thought the STAR training sounded reasonable, including the requirement to recertify every three years.
“We’re trying to have high standards here in Newport and keep the community safe and to provide all the tools we can for our law enforcement officers as they’re out and about,” she said. “I think the more we can do to have these employees trained, it helps keep them safe. It helps keep the establishment owners safe, as well as the public.”
Newport Commissioner Ken Rechtin liked the idea of holding businesses to high standards. He said the STAR training isn’t much different from “SAFE Services,” a uniform system for ensuring that people washing dishes and keeping food safe when served are held to a high standard.
Newport ABC Administrator Diane Ramey called the surrounding cities of Dayton, Bellevue, Alexandria and Covington to check in on their requirements. She said Dayton, Bellevue, and Alexandria do not require anything, while Covington only uses the STAR training if it has an established program with three or more calls per year.
Newport Mayor Tom Guidugli Jr. asked if the city knew what its compliance rate was for the bar IDs.
Newport Police Department Captain Paul Kunkel, who checks the bar IDs regularly, said the city has a very high percentage of people participating in its program.
Extended hours licenses
Hayden said the city currently has 108 establishments that serve alcohol. That number includes convenience stores, movie theaters, etc., not just bars. Out of that 108, 23 alcohol establishments are licensed to serve until 2:30 a.m.
Under state law, those businesses can serve until midnight. Traditionally, Newport has allowed them to operate until 1 a.m. with no additional cost. At one time, the city did allow any business to get the extended hours license to operate until 2:30 a.m., but that was changed to not allow new businesses to get those extended permits anywhere except for Newport on the Levee.
Newport discussed extending those licenses to the central business district, which includes Monmouth Street and parts of York Street up to 6th Street.
“One of the arguments that I hear back and forth over time about this, when you go to a bar, is, ‘my bar shouldn’t be punished because somebody down the street doesn’t know how to operate their business the right way,’ Hayden said. “I think that’s a fair criticism.”
He also suggested that the city consider adding some protective layers for the residents at the same time. His proposal for that was a new five-person board. Unlike the citizen boards, which are 100% residents, Hayden suggested that there be a member of the police department, a bar owner, a city staff member and two residents.
The way it would work is that an owner would apply for an after-hours permit and appear in front of the board. The owner would explain their bar’s location, and the board would be free to ask questions and determine if conditions or restrictions were necessary.
Further, at the end of the year, Ramey reviews all the bars. If a particular establishment has repeated problems before Ramey determines whether to renew the permit, it could be asked to go to the board and explain the issues.
“I think that holds these people’s feet to the fire,” Hayden said. “I think that we put restrictions. I think this board can also yank the license.”
Rechtin said he wants to see the extended hours license conversation move slowly to ensure all their ducks are in a row.
“My mind is open, let me just say that first, but you’re going to hear a lot of questions about this thing,” Rechtin said. “I will need a list of what 2:30 licenses are out there, where they are, and a [police] run list about where they’re going to and how many times they’re going annually, or something like that.”
Seagraves also spoke during the public comment section on the extended-hours licenses. He said that when the rule was passed that no 2:30 a.m. licenses could be anywhere except Newport on the Levee, it showed support and favoritism for whatever was by the river.
“At the end of the day, that rule in 2020 did absolutely nothing to curb any problems inside of Newport,” Seagraves said. “It did absolutely nothing to get any of the bad actors under control, and the only thing that it did was cause good actors to be punished for the acts of other people, and that’s a fairness issue.”
He also took issue with the rule that all customers must be outside the door at 1 a.m. He said his customers need an hour to an hour and a half to finish a cigar.
“I started tracking since we had kicked that 1 a.m. out the door, all the feet of the customers out the door at 1 a.m.,” he said. “On average, my sales are down $60,000 a year, and that is not counting any additional licensing.”
Radwanski said that as the city expands its hospitality footprint by having more hotels on Monmouth, it also has to be pragmatic about ensuring that the people staying there have places to go.
He said the city needs to move on some of these issues. One in particular he called out was the city’s passing of an entertainment district in 2023 that has yet to be activated. Radwanski said the city cannot live in the past.
“I do have some concerns as we talk about bar ID,” Radwanski said. “I certainly hope we’re not going to roll something out and not look at the 2:30 license topic first because we’re just going to restrict our establishments. High standards are just fantastic. I love high standards, but by golly, we got to be able to finish what we started before we can go and pursue new legislation.”
