Pennsylvania House Committee Advances Liquor Privatization

Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives Liquor Control Committee this week passed legislation to privatize liquor sales. 

While the Republican-run General Assembly passed and Governor Tom Wolf (D) signed a 2016 measure allowing grocery stores to sell wine and liberalizing some other alcoholic-beverage regulations, the Keystone State remains among the most tightly controlled in terms of liquor distribution. The commonwealth owns 600 “Fine Wine & Good Spirits” stores which have sole permission to sell both wine and hard liquor; only Utah’s system is equally monopolistic.

In January, State Representative Natalie Mihalek (R-Pittsburgh) introduced an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution to privatize the state-run liquor stores. Republican lawmakers have pushed for privatization for many years but have garnered no support among their Democratic colleagues.

This is despite privatization’s popularity among Pennsylvanians of varied political stripes. While right-leaning voters support the idea most enthusiastically, the leftist Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News both have editorialized that the commonwealth should relinquish control. 

And this spring, a Franklin & Marshall College Poll found that 52 percent of registered voters want distribution turned over to the private sector. Among conservatives, that support reaches 61 percent in favor versus 28 percent against; yet a 46-percent plurality of liberals said they back privatization versus 35 percent who said they oppose it.

One major reason Democratic legislators refuse to support modernizing the liquor system: opposition from unions including, most prominently, the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1776, which represents about 3,500 employees of the commonwealth’s liquor-sales establishments…. (Excerpt from The Pennsylvania Daily Star)