Johnson County bars struggle to survive with antiquated law. Voters can change that
When looking for the right location to open her brewery, Courtney Servaes said Johnson County was almost out of the question. She did not want to hassle with a lingering liquor law rooted in Kansas’ long, and often strange, history of prohibition.
Despite her concerns, she chose to open Servaes Brewing Co. in downtown Shawnee last year. But she says she’s been losing money trying to comply with the law ever since.
Owners of small bars across Johnson County are hoping voters will repeal the liquor-by-the-drink law, which requires businesses that serve alcohol to generate 30% of their sales from food. The question will be on the ballot on Nov. 3.
“It’s not that we don’t want food or can’t sell food. We just have this hard limit. If we don’t make it by half a percent, theoretically, we could lose our liquor license,” said Mike McVey, owner of Transport Brewery, also in downtown Shawnee.
If voters repeal the law, many business owners said, it will be easier to operate and open craft breweries, cocktail bars and wineries in these Kansas City suburbs. Rather than spending energy on offering food specials or finding other creative ways to meet the quota — which many said leaves them hemorrhaging cash — the bar owners say they can focus on what they do best.
“If it passes, we’ll be able to operate primarily as a brewery. If it fails, we’ll either have to close or essentially become a restaurant. That’s a horrible outcome for us,” McVey said.
Small-business owners say the law, which has been in place since 1986, makes it more difficult to compete with bars operating in Kansas City or Wyandotte County, where liquor laws are looser. Still, some believe, that at least at one time, the law served a purpose, curbing alcohol sales to ensure Johnson County would keep a family-friendly atmosphere in its downtowns and entertainment districts.
But others argue that new microbreweries and specialty bars are revitalizing areas, such as downtown Shawnee, in a way that lawmakers wouldn’t have imagined decades ago.
“The subject starts to bleed into the social condition or social fabric of a community,” said Johnson County Commissioner Michael Ashcraft, who, despite some concerns, voted along with the rest of the board to put the issue on the ballot. “This is really about the cultural context of alcohol in Kansas.”
From Carry Nation to full-strength beer
The liquor-by-the-drink rule is one of the last vestiges of the strict alcohol regulations dating back to the 1880s, when Kansas became the first state in the country to write prohibition into its constitution.
That was four decades before the rest of the country went dry. And it took 15 years after national prohibition ended in 1933 for Kansans to repeal it in their state.
And even today, some laws and regulations have hung over from that era.
“What we see, if we look at the historical documentation, is never a full repeal of prohibition in Kansas, but a changing of the rules piece-by-piece and sometimes county by county,” said Andrew Gustafson, a historian with the Johnson County Museum. “This history is longer than any other state.”
Gustafson said when it comes to alcohol prohibition, Kansas has always “been on the conservative vanguard.” The state garnered national attention when hatchet-wielding prohibitionist Carry Nation traveled to taverns to hack apart their taps, kegs and bottles in the early 1900s.
Years later, the “bone dry” bill was signed in 1917, making it illegal for any person to possess or consume liquor in Kansas. Many Kansans considered the state’s laws a model for national Prohibition when it was instituted with the 18th Amendment in 1920.
If Johnson Countians wanted a drink, they could take a trolley or the Strang Line streetcar across the state line to Kansas City, notorious as a “wide-open town” during Prohibition.
It wasn’t until 1965 that state lawmakers legalized the sale of alcohol in “private clubs,” which required customers to show their membership cards.
“One would join the club, and the club would keep a bottle with your name on it behind the bar for you to enjoy while you were at that bar,” Gustafson said.
In the early 1970s, Attorney General Vern Miller made national headlines for proclaiming that drinking alcohol on airplanes was forbidden while flying in Kansas airspace. At the time, Miller was quoted arguing that, “Kansas goes all the way up and it goes all the way down.”
And finally in 1986, voters approved a state constitutional amendment allowing liquor sales at public businesses. But many counties, including Johnson, did so while requiring that restaurants earn 30% of their income from food.
“This was a step that allowed the sale of alcohol, but ensured that places selling the drinks would not simply be bars. It is pretty consistent with the long history of small steps repealing portions of the statewide prohibition of alcohol,” Gustafson said.
Since then, liquor laws have slowly relaxed. In the early 2000s, the state allowed liquor stores and other businesses to sell alcohol on Sundays, unless cities decided otherwise. And just last year, Kansas made a sweeping change allowing grocery and convenience stores to sell “full-strength” beer, with up to 6% alcohol. Before, the only beer you could buy in those stores was limited to 3.2% alcohol — a rule dating back to the 1930s.
But the 30% requirement for bars and restaurants has remained. Johnson County is one of 67 counties in Kansas with the requirement, while 35 others — including Wyandotte, Douglas, Shawnee and Sedgwick — do not have such a rule. And Kansas still has three dry counties.
In a more rural area, voters in Atchison County, north of Leavenworth, will also decide in November whether to drop the 30% rule.
“We’re the last urban county to have this requirement. And it’s very outdated,” Johnson County Commissioner Becky Fast said. “It’s making it very difficult for microbreweries and wineries to open their businesses and survive because of this rule.”
A new kind of scene
When Clay Johnston opened Brew Lab in downtown Overland Park a few years ago, there were no other breweries around, unless he drove across the state line.
“It was a bit of a Wild West. There wasn’t really a template for how to do this in Kansas,” Johnston said.
Knowing he would be required to rake in 30% of sales from food, Johnston built his business around having a kitchen. And while that allows him to meet that number each year, he knows other breweries aren’t as capable, or don’t have an interest in running a kitchen.
In the past couple of years, more craft breweries, wineries and specialty cocktail bars have been popping up across the county, catching up with the trend in Kansas City and other metro areas. In downtown Shawnee, the new bars are helping business leaders transform the area into more of an entertainment district, said Dustin Wolfe, spokesman with the Shawnee Chamber of Commerce. In turn, that has helped attract new residents, housing projects and restaurants.
But the business owners all say the “outdated” law makes it difficult to keep theirs doors open.
“We’re all struggling with the food requirement. So we’re all trying to be creative to make it work. We were able to renew our license this year because we hit 30.5%. But it was a struggle to get there,” said Emily Mobley, owner of Limitless Brewing in Lenexa.
When it’s time for bars to renew their liquor license, they must report total gross sales and how much came from food. If a bar is not in compliance, its liquor license might not be renewed for up to two years, said Zach Fletcher, spokesman with the Kansas Department of Revenue.
Limitless, Transport and other breweries partner with restaurants and food trucks to try to sell enough food, but the owners said they essentially do not make money off the sales. Others try to make it by selling pizza and other food they can offer without a full kitchen.
“We can’t force people to buy food. The staff and overhead that food creates is certainly a barrier to entry for business owners,” said Jill Cockson, owner of Drastic Measures cocktail bar in Shawnee. “And it places businesses in competition with each other. We’re all forced to compete with each other over dinner time, when many of us aren’t doing this to even sell food.”
Business owners interviewed said they would still offer food and partner with local restaurants if the law is repealed. But it would eliminate “that constant pressure and looming fear over us,” Servaes said.
A ‘huge’ impact
Bar owners argue that the food sales requirement has become archaic as trends in alcohol consumption change. Many of the new breweries and cocktail bars sprouting up offer higher priced drinks with unique flavors, some brewed in-house.
They aren’t the dive bars or taverns popular in college towns or other areas around Kansas City.
“Breweries didn’t really exist in the form they do now when the rule was created. We don’t even stay open late. It’s not about people coming in to get drunk and stumble out. It’s really about trying new flavors and the experience of it,” Servaes said.
Still, Ashcraft, who represents central Johnson County on the board of commissioners, said he’s heard some concerns about the law change potentially transforming the family-friendly atmosphere of bars and restaurants.
“I’ve spoken with some law enforcement, and while some say it won’t be a problem, there is an argument it may remove that structure that tries to cater to families or more generalized populations. Businesses argue it will be beneficial, and I don’t doubt that. But it will potentially have an impact and change that kind of fabric of Johnson County establishments,” Ashcraft said.
Many bar owners argued that they will keep their same hours and that they already have regulations preventing them from over-serving. They say the law hearkens back to Kansas’ long history of strictly regulating alcohol and has become irrelevant today.
“Bars have really gone from being quantity-driven to more quality-driven in a lot of cases. And that goes to the price point,” Cockson said. “It’s an expensive way to get drunk. And I think I’ve seen people become more responsible. We don’t serve shots. And at our price points, we attract a more responsible consumer.”
Some business leaders argue that when voting in the November election, agreeing to repeal the liquor-by-the-drink law is one way to help small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People want their neighborhoods to have local businesses. And now with COVID, it seems like the future of restaurants and bars is smaller, lower overhead, and making them as affordable as possible for the business owners,” Cockson said. “So this is something the public can do now to help small businesses. And it will be huge.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
