Will ban on beer in the streets during festivals hurt sponsors and businesses?

A move by the town to restrict the consumption of alcohol at street fairs and festivals has some downtown merchants seeing red — and the organizations that sponsor the events or sell alcohol at them worried about losing significant revenue.

The town board, at the urging of the Riverhead Community Awareness Program, is considering new rules for alcohol sales and consumption at street fairs and festivals that would ban alcohol sales outside of a designated area and prohibit people from walking around the festivals carrying cups containing alcoholic beverages.

The stated aim of the proposed new rules is to more effectively prevent sales of alcohol to people under 21 and to reduce the risk of people driving while intoxicated after leaving the festival — also reducing the potential liability of the town, festival organizers and servers for serving alcohol to intoxicated persons.

“Fairs and festivals where alcohol is served are high-risk environments for underage drinking,” Riverhead Community Awareness Program executive director Felicia Scocozza told town board members at Thursday’s work session, where she gave a presentation to the board and representatives of the Riverhead Country Fair and the Polish Town Fair and Festival.

“We’re all about prevention,” Scocozza said. The nonprofit organization was founded in 1979 to address alcohol and other substance abuse within the Riverhead schools and community.

The group hired outside professionals to do extensive surveying of middle school and high school students in Riverhead. “Twenty-four percent of 10th graders and 36.7 percent of 12th graders who drank alcohol in the past year did so at a fair or festival,” Scocozza told the board.

Limiting the sale of alcohol to a designated area or areas at a festival and adopting rules prohibiting people from leaving that area with drinks in hand is the first line of defense against underage drinking, she said. People looking to enter the designated alcohol sales area would be carded at the entry and would receive a non-transferable wristband to indicate that they are 21 or older. Alcoholic beverages would be sold only to people wearing the wristband. No one would be allowed to carry the alcohol outside of the designated area.

“Riverhead doesn’t have a problem — they’re trying to create one,” said Tweed’s Restaurant and Buffalo Bar owner Ed Tuccio Tuesday. During the Country Fair, he sells beer from a booth behind his restaurant, the practice of several other downtown restaurants during the Country Fair.

“People are here to have fun,” Tuccio said. “This is an experience. If you go to Southampton to see the 4th of July parade, do you think they’re going to stop you from drinking a beer while you’re sitting along the parade route? Same thing for the St. Patrick’s Day in Westhampton. In Patchogue, you’ve got Live at 5,” he said.

“This is ridiculous. There are very few events that downtown restaurants can take advantage of. In fact there’s only one,” Tuccio said, referring to the Country Fair, which takes place in the Peconic River parking lot on the Sunday of Columbus Day weekend.

“I see this as a way to give one organization — Riverhead Rotary — the right to sell beer at the festival,” Tuccio said.

Rotary sells beer at several festival booths at the Country Fair each year and it’s a significant fundraiser for the all-volunteer organization.

“Rotary didn’t ask for this and in fact hasn’t even discussed it yet,” said Mary Ellen Ellwood, who sits on the board of both the Rotary club and Townscape, the nonprofit organization that runs the Country Fair.

Ellwood, who attended Thursday’s work session, said the supervisor’s office called to ask her to the meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

“CAP is driving this bus — not us,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “Downtown merchants are not happy about this,” she said. [Townscape president] Tom Farruggia has been fielding calls from downtown restaurant owners who are unhappy with this idea. They’re all furious.”

Tuccio said the parking district committee discussed the proposal last week and “no one likes the idea.” To his mind, it’s just adding insult to injury.

“We bought the parking lot. We own the parking lot. We pay for the electricity and haven’t gotten reimbursed for it by the Country Fair in the 25 years that they’ve been using it,” Tuccio said. He’s angry with the town board for spending the parking district’s money to buy a parcel of vacant land on the corner of Third Street and Roanoke Avenue, leaving no money to do needed repairs to the district’s existing lots.

He said he and his wife Dee Muma, owner of Dark Horse Tavern, will do whatever it takes to protect their businesses, including bringing a lawsuit.

“They have to be very careful to not create an issue that doesn’t exist,” he said. “If one-third of the seniors in Riverhead High School have been exposed to alcohol — I’d say that’s pretty remarkable if it’s that small.”

(Editor’s note: The numbers Scocozza quoted did not say one-third of the seniors drink beer; they said 36.7 percent who said they drank alcohol in the past year did so at a fair or festival.)

“It’s supposed to be an entertainment district,” Tuccio said. “We should be helping the businesses downtown, not hurting them — and helping these little microbreweries too.” He said if the Country Fair were going to have a designated “beer garden” then Riverhead’s three microbreweries should be selling beer in it. “Why bring crappy beer to a country fair when you have Moustache Brewery, Crooked Ladder and Long Ireland producing beer locally?”

The owner of Diggers Ales and Eats, who was a founder of Crooked Ladder, said he’s taking a “wait and see” attitude about the proposed new rules.

“If they want to try it for a year and see how it works, I don’t see it as that big a deal,” Steve Wirth said in an interview. “I don’t see the need to panic. I suspect people are getting up in arms over things that may not affect their individual businesses as much as they fear.”

Drunkenness at the Country Fair has never been a problem, Wirth said. “It’s always a pretty mellow event. Even the Polish festival — I don’t see it ever getting out of control. It’s very well-managed,” Wirth said.

Back in the days of the Blues Festival, Wirth said he began closing Digger’s early to avoid having already-intoxicated people coming in, seeking to be served more alcohol. That was a hassle — and a liability, he said.

“Requiring people to drink in a pen strikes me as a little weird,” Wirth said.

Jamesport Fire Chief Sean McCabe said the Jamesport Fire Department has had a beer garden at its annual summer carnival for 10 or 15 years now, McCabe said. It hasn’t cut down on sales, though he acknowledges the fire department is fairly relaxed about allowing people to stroll the carnival grounds with beer in hand.

“The whole site is fenced in,” McCabe said. “And no one is let off the property carrying beer.”

“All of our guys are Tips-certified,” McCabe said, referring to an alcohol sales training program that teaches people who are selling alcoholic beverages how to ID customers and how to determine if they’ve had too much to drink — a condition that requires the seller to refuse to provide an alcoholic beverage to a customer.

Tuccio and Wirth said their bartenders are all Tips-certified. “They have to be according to the liquor authority’s rules,” Tuccio said.

CAP’s Scocozza told the board all volunteers selling beer at a festival should be required to complete the Tips training also.

Polish Town Civic Association president Tom Mielnicki told the board Thursday that the proposed new rules “would change the whole flavor” of the annual Polish Town Fair and Festival.

“People like to come to the festival, get a beer and walk around with their families,” Mielnicki said. “They don’t want to be confined to one area — an area that their children can’t enter.”

The Polish Town Civic Association is the only beer vendor at the annual August fair; it runs six booths at various locations, Mielnicki said. Establishing one designated area, or even a few, is bound to drastically cut the association’s revenue from beer sales, he said.

Ellwood said she agrees with that assessment. “I’m thinking it may not be worth it for Rotary to sell beer. We’ll see.”

A majority of the town board favored moving forward with adopting new rules. Councilman John Dunleavy will oversee developing them, Supervisor Sean Walter said.

Editor’s notes: The author is a member of the Rotary Club of Riverhead and the CAP Community Coalition.

This article has been amended to reflect the following correction: The owners of Crooked Ladder Brewery were misidentified in the original version of this article.