The passage of new state legislation last month slated 225 new liquor licenses to hit Boston’s streets in the coming years.
After celebration following the law’s signing by Gov. Maura Healey, advocates and city officials now are turning their attention to how to make sure those licenses are distributed equitably across the 13 ZIP codes set to receive new liquor licenses.
At a City Council hearing Oct. 1, council members, alongside staff and leadership from the city’s Economic Opportunity and Inclusion Cabinet, proposed a door-knocking campaign to talk to potential applicants and discussed increased support offered by the city. The hearing focused on promoting the new licenses as well as reducing barriers to application.
City councilors framed the conversation as the start of a process looking to engage with the communities that will receive the new licenses. Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said the hearing was “just the beginning” of the work the Council intends to take up around them. Of the new licenses, 198 will be limited by ZIP code, 15 will be reserved for community and arts organizations, and the remaining 12 will be unrestricted, transferable licenses.
“What we’re doing here today is making sure that these licenses — which are essentially a golden ticket and an economic tool for a lot of restaurateurs — are distributed equitably across the 13 ZIP codes over the next three years,” said District 4 Councilor Brian Worrell, who introduced the original home rule petition that put the issue in front of the state Legislature.
An onerous current process
Restaurateurs who spoke at the hearing said that the current process can be hampered by an opaque application and a complex community engagement process.
Maya Mukhopadhaya, who is looking to operate her Jamaica Plain coffee shop Jadu as a wine bar in the evenings, said during the hearing that she had to attend five different community meetings in a month as part of the engagement process. Three separate times, she had to spend hours in the heat and the rain putting up flyers. At the time, when she asked if there was a way to streamline the process, she was told no.
She also said in her remarks at the hearing that she eventually hired an attorney to help her fill out the application—not for legal support, but because they knew the right language to make it successful.
“This should be an application where we can fill it out successfully without requiring legal help,” she
Kathleen Joyce, who chairs the city’s Licensing Board, said that staff in her office is able to support restaurateurs with questions like how to word parts of the applications.
Kyisha Davenport, general manager of Comfort Kitchen in Upham’s Corner, said that differing schedules between the hours during which the city government tends to operate compared to those of restaurant owners also can contribute to trouble navigating the process.
Improving the process
Representatives from the city’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion said they had already launched some efforts to adjust the process for the first round of licenses. The ZIP code-restricted licenses will be parceled out over three years under the new law.
Already, the city has launched some social media promotion around the new licenses to try to drum up attention and applications. And the city’s Licensing Board — which is housed under Economic Opportunity and Inclusion — is continuing to offer support, such as office hours every other Wednesday, for applicants with questions about the process.
In a change from the way the Licensing Board had previously handled the applications, those applying for licenses under the new set will be considered in batches, with the first closing Dec. 6. Between now and then, the Board will hold the public hearings that every applicant has to go through, but will hold off on actually voting to approve until after the deadline, so they can consider all the options for how to dole out the first round.
Joyce said the Board expects that certain neighborhoods, there will be more applications than there are available licenses. By approving them in batches, she said businesses don’t have to feel as stressed about being first in line and can make sure the applications are as strong as possible.
The process also will allow the city to make sure that, as they hand out the licenses, they can do so in a more balanced and equitable way.
“We want to make sure these licenses are put to the best use according to the standards that we analyze these licenses already,” Joyce said. “We want to allow people to get their application in order, to work with the community, to work with our staff and prepare to present the best proposal possible.”
Supporting new applicants
Segun Idowu, the city’s Economic Opportunity and Inclusion chief, said that potential applicants shouldn’t feel rushed to make the first deadline at the end of this year.
“This is just the first round. There will be two more coming, because you’ve got three years to distribute these licenses,” he said. “People don’t need to rush right now to get into the line.”
Another change from how the Board had operated: License applications, once they receive a positive vote, will be approved, pending an available license, for up to a year. Previously, they had a shelf-life of only 30 days.
That means that, for the next 12 months, including in future rounds of consideration for licenses under the new law, a business that has applied will still be eligible to receive one if it becomes available, rather than having to reapply.
To further support businesses, the city plans to run webinars and information sessions to communicate what opportunities exist with these new licenses, who is eligible and how would-be applicants can pursue them.
At the suggestion of Nick Korn, managing partner at OFFSITE, a marketing and strategy firm focused on the food and beverage industry, Idowu also expressed support for a door-knocking campaign using the list of businesses that currently hold a common victualler license, which permits a business to make and sell food for consumption onsite, but don’t have a liquor license.
That effort, alongside things like running boot camps to make sure people feel prepared to offer alcohol, was part of a broader vision Korn pushed during remarks at the hearing to reach out to business owners who might not see information about the new batch of permits through social media or other city outreach.
He also encouraged city councilors to use their local connections to set up conversations in communities — an effort Idowu supported and said his team would be happy to show up at.
“I think this is something the Council can really help with,” Korn said, “with the deep, long relationships you have in the community, to make sure that everybody who could know about this does know about this, and they have an opportunity to make a decision whether they want to apply, rather than the folks who apply are the ones who happen to know about it and happen to get through that process.”
A work in progress
Though City Councilors and panelists celebrated the 225 new licenses, they also framed this batch of permits as, ideally, just the beginning.
“Even though we’re throwing this historic bill at it, it’s still not living up to the disparity that we’re still facing,” Worrell said.
Idowu said that demonstrated interested in these licenses would go a long way to show that there is a need for them in these communities — a question he said came up in discussions on Beacon Hill during the passage of the law.
“I think the opportunity here is to show that there is a huge demand, particularly in these ZIP codes, for these licenses,” Idowu said. “We’re looking forward to, in a couple of years, [the City Council] leading the charge to bring more licenses to the city.”
For Korn, this process presents an opportunity to revamp how the city communicates around licenses. He suggested the city pursue a dashboard to show how many licenses are available — so that once the 225 licenses are put out, applicants don’t have to rely on luck or inside knowledge to know that they should submit an application when another license is set to become available.
He also advocated for a demographic survey of who has a license now, so that there’s a more definitive answer to questions around what the city’s population of license-holders looks like.
“Something that continued to come up throughout this process was people asking, ‘Well, how many licenses are held by someone who self-identifies as X?’ and the only answer is, ‘We don’t know,’” he said.
Despite all the logistics that are still in development to make roll-out of the new licenses smooth and accessible, restaurateurs expressed hope at the potential they offer.
The new licenses could open a door to let Melissa Stefanini open and operate a business in her own neighborhood, East Boston.
“While I love being spread in so many directions, I would love to focus my efforts at home and do something I know my neighbors want,” said Stefanini, who owns Super Bien and Buenas, Latin American-inspired “grocery bars” in Brighton’s Charles River Speedway and Somerville’s Union Square, respectively.
Davenport, of Comfort Kitchen, said she hopes the new licenses will bring changes to the city’s restaurant landscape that she has long waited for.
“It sounds like the dream of hospitality that I’ve been working towards here for the past eight years,” she said. “I look forward to seeing restaurants develop a community here that is truly inclusive, that speaks to the diversity of our city and allows us to reimagine Boston as a hospitality destination.”
