City Of Seattle Now An Alcohol Impact Area

You've been in a meeting all morning. Exactly how many coworkers have to pontificate on the benefits of the new TPS reporting system before they let you out of there? All of them, apparently, even though everyone in the room knows you're moving to the new reports. "Um, excuse me, but can we go over the submission system again?" "Which part of it?" "All of it. I just got here." It looks like a few people have weird jaw aches, but they're actually reaching for cynide teeth. Come noon you're going to bust through those revolving doors like a bat out of hell and head straight to the nearest convenience store for a frosty Pabst Ice.

And the shop keeper will diss you. No more Pabst Ice downtown. No more Bull Ice, Busch Ice, Colt 45 Ice, Hurricane Ice, Keystone Ice, Lucky Ice, High Life Ice, Natural Ice, Old Milwaukee Ice or Schmidt Ice. You're in an Alcohol Impact Area, yo. No Ice Downtown or in Belltown, Uptown, Capitol Hill or in the Central, International or University districts. This is as of yesterday. The Washington State Liquer Control Board decided that cheap beers that are high in alcohol content shouldn't be available in those areas.

We're pretty sure this is just an update to the Pioneer Square Alcohol Impact ordinance of a couple of years ago which allowed itself to be expanded if certain criteria were met:

Section 3. No further mandatory AIA designations shall occur in the City unless and until a review of the Pioneer Square AIA which determines the effectiveness of the AIA policy has been completed. This review shall happen no sooner than 9 months after the date on which the State Liquor Control Board recognizes the Pioneer Square AIA and imposes restrictions on the sales of alcohol products.

Did the board determine the effectiveness of the AIA policy? This P-I article says the results were mixed.

This isn't about pushing public inebriates out to the suburbs, though, this is about implementing the elusive Ten Year Plan to end homelessness in the city of Seattle. Because if you can't buy Hurricane Ice Downtown...fuck it, might as well clean up and get a job.

Combined with the city's war on nightclubs (which Dan Savage brought his BB gun and box of chocolate chip cookie arsenal to bear on this week) we're getting downright aggressive towards the drink in a city that, frankly, is very near tea-totaling to begin with.

Meanwhile, you can now have a bottle of out-of-state wine shipped directly to your house. See, the LCB giveth as well as taketh away.