State Senator Bill Clabough (R-Maryville) and Representative Richard Montgomery (R-Seymour) are taking Sevier County’s request for change seriously. The two local legislators have copies of the resolution requesting that counties be given more control over their beer laws that passed the county commission Monday night.
The resolution is in fact just a request and is one of hundreds of requests for change sent to Nashville by the county governments across the state each year. Clabough recognized quickly that the limited controls the state grants counties had caused problems in Sevier County.
The senator requested that the legislature’s Legal Services office produce a report outlining the differences between the authority granted to county governments and those granted to cities. This would be the first step in defining a bill that would begin to address the request made by the Sevier County Commission. The filing deadline for bills in this year’s General Assembly has already passed, but among the 3,500 bills filed, there may be some other options.
Sevier County has specifically asked for counties to have more beer authority in regulating drive-through windows, days and hours of beer sales, structure controls over glass frontage, and other items that were incorporated in its old beer resolution, but have not been enforced, due to legal advice that the county has not been granted such authority from the state. While the beer and alcohol lobbies in Nashville have fought such changes before, at least one of those items carries some weight.
Several states either forbid drive-through window sales of beer or have requirements regarding quantity. Single beer sales and in some states six-pack sales are prohibited from sale through a drive-through. In those areas, beer can only be sold through the drive-through by the case. The thought process being that such requirements reduce the chances of drinking and driving and/or make it extremely clear to an arresting officer that there is beer in the vehicle.
While changing the state laws on county authority over beer sales will be an uphill battle for both legislators, there are some examples from neighboring states to be found that could win some minor changes.

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