By Ashley Toland Editor

Council considers revoking licenses of two local convenience stores

Due to an unusually exciting council meeting yesterday, Ashley decided to post this column today instead of “Mobileus Politicalus Loclaus: Part Deux.”

Check in the next issue or back here on Jan. 18 for the conclusion of that series.

The Mobile City Council initially recommended year-long suspensions yesterday of the retail beer and wine licenses of two convenience stores, who were each cited multiple times for selling alcohol to minors over the last year. But by the end of the day, a meeting was called for Friday to re-evaluate this decision.

The stores in question, M& Q Food Mart located at 1861 Government St. and Shell Food Mart #122 located at 10 N. University Blvd., were each fined for selling beer to under-age-and-cover Mobile Police cadets. This all a part of an ongoing effort by the MPD’s Underage Drinking Task Force, whose objective is to help eliminate the purchase and consumption of alcohol by minors.

During the public hearing, Police Chief Sam Cochran said the 19-year-old cadets, acting on tips either called or sent in via the Internet, were sent into the stores to purchase one or two single cans of beer. Cochran reported the young officers were never asked to present identification at M&Q. And at the Shell they were either not asked for identification or they negligently overrode the computer when false a ID was presented. The clerks were all arrested and fined. He recommended three-day suspensions of both of their business licenses in order to give them ample time to rid their locations of alcohol and then 90 and 60 day suspensions of their retail beer and wine licenses at M&Q and Shell respectively. The latter receiving a lighter recommendation because Cochran felt they had provided better training to their employees despite the events.

M& Q owner, Mahmod Qusgas, an immigrant from Brazil, along with his attorney said he had terminated each of the clerks who sold the alcohol and had stressed to all of his employees that they must check IDs. After his third offense, he recognized a different system was needed and installed an expensive cash register, which requires the clerks to type in the customers’ birth dates and a Web camera, which allows him to monitor employees from his home or anywhere else where he has Internet access.

In front of a crowd of St. Paul’s students and parents, local beer distributors and Chief of Police Sam Cochran, who were all there to show support for these measures, Councilman Ben Brooks gently advocated the near maximum penalty of a 12-month suspension, but added he would go along with whatever his fellow councilpersons thought was best, as he wasn’t trying to “one up anyone.” Under the ordinance passed by the council in 2003, they could have voted to revoke the businesses’ licenses altogether.

Councilpersons Copeland and Carroll immediately jumped on Brooks’s bandwagon, each saying an example needed to be made, with Carroll adding that it was ultimately the responsibility of the business owner to make sure his employees were enforcing the law.

After the council had already made a litany of comments to this effect following Qusgas’s presentation, and it was already apparent where this was going, Dan Blackburn, attorney for Herndon Oil Company, who owns the Shell Food Mart, had the seemingly pointless task of presenting his case to councilors who clearly had already made up their minds.

Blackburn said that Herndon Oil Company, who owns many stations in the area, had up until this point, a sterling reputation in the community as being strict enforcers of this law, even earning them membership in the ABC Board’s Responsible Vendor program, a distinction all of their stores lost after this particular mart’s third violation. Herndon said the company had severely reprimanded one clerk, who had been a long term, valued employee and fired the other two. They have since implemented a zero tolerance policy, with not only the immediate termination of any clerk in violation but also consequences for management.

Clinton Johnson was the only councilor to express initial reservations at giving the 12-month penalties, saying he had trouble “reconciling” whether these were honest owners who had done everything they could but just had employed clerks who may not operate under the same moral code as their employers. He questioned if the owner should always be held responsible for the actions of individual employees.

Councilpersons Gina Gregory, Connie Hudson and Fred Richardson all called for six- month suspensions at first, but in some sort of weird “group think” scenario that was like watching the formation of a mob, they all, along with Johnson and the rest of the council, agreed the resolution, which will be voted on next Tuesday, should be drafted as a 12-month suspension.

However, immediately following the meeting, Councilmen Johnson and Richardson expressed doubts when asked by Lagniappe what exactly these owners were supposed to do (other than the steps they had already claimed they had taken) to prove they were trying to be responsible vendors. After deliberating and taking into account that the chief of police had only recommended 90 and 60 day suspensions, they told council attorney Jim Rossler they wanted to change the penalty to what the chief had suggested.

Later in the day, a public safety meeting was called for Friday at 3 p.m. to discuss the resolution further.

Why I hated the council yesterday

Ok. No one wants teenagers to be able to purchase alcohol, well except teenagers. There are way too many alcohol-related fatalities and injuries involving the little brats. So much so, I’m sure we all have our own stories of personal loss to tell.

But in these two cases, the punishments simply do not fit the crimes.

Yes, they were each cited three times. That seems like a lot on the surface. But they were all different clerks, all of which, except one, are no longer employed by the stations. And after the first instance, the police intentionally went back into these specific stores over the course of a year. I would be willing to bet a kidney that if these undercover operations were performed randomly, that the majority of gas stations in the area would receive three violations over a year’s time. Because let’s face it, you ain’t gonna get Ph.D.s to be convenience store clerks. And besides that, in most cases, it’s probably more of an issue of indifference rather than intelligence. How many times have you walked into a station and the clerk didn’t even bother to put her cell phone down to check you out?

If they decide to go with the 12-month suspension, poor immigrant Mahmod, might as well put the closed sign on the door permanently. A convenience store without beer? Come on. He’d have to sell a truckload of Little Debbies to make up for that lost revenue.

And this poor guy was working from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. everyday when he first opened the store. When he finally couldn’t physically do it anymore, he hired people to help him out. (Of course, according to the police report, the first clerk that was arrested couldn’t even speak English and had to have his brother translate what was happening. Mahmod, that’s probably not such a good idea.) But still there was never an instance where he was present when this happened. Again, the guy fired all of the clerks, made it known that not checking IDs wouldn’t be tolerated and finally put in a fancy new, expensive register and camera system. What else do they want him to do? I agree he should be punished, but do it for three months, like the chief recommended, and then if it happens again, look at something more severe.

The other station’s owners had enjoyed a good record at all of their stores except this one. After realizing it was a problem, they drafted new store policies to more effectively deal with it.

If either of these owners had shown blatant disregard for rectifying their situations, I would be all for suspending their licenses for a year or revoking them altogether. But this isn’t the case, and it makes me wonder why there was a call for such a draconian response. Was it because all three TV stations were there or the hoity toity Saint Paul’s students and parents?

By the way, I find it slightly amusing, that Saint Paul’s kids have become the poster-teens against underage drinking, when their school is one of a handful in town whose students are members of HIGH SCHOOL fraternities and sororities, where drinking certainly doesn’t seem to be frowned upon.

When I interviewed one Saint Paul and HIGH SCHOOL fraternity alumnus yesterday, he laughed when I asked if drinking was a part of his HIGH SCHOOL fraternity, and said, “do you really think we would have gone through hazing, if alcohol wasn’t involved?” Then he chuckled again.

We all know kids are going to try and get alcohol any way they can. I certainly did. If we didn’t have someone’s older brother buying it for us, we’d pay some guy $10 bucks to go in and get our bottles of Strawberry Hill or six packs of Milwaukee’s Best (Ahhh- The Beast!).

But of course, as a responsible community, we need to put up every roadblock we can, including revoking business licenses of the owners who are basically putting out the welcome mats to these teens. But I just don’t see that to be the case with these two stores. If you guys want to make an example, do it to the ones who truly deserve it

Ashley Toland is Lagniappe editor. Contact her at ashleytoland@lagniappemobile.com.

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