State Bills Would Allow Local Bars to Extend Sales Hours

February 18, 2015

States including Massachusetts, Michigan, and Nebraska have introduced legislation that would allow bar hours to be extended, allowing extensions ranging from several hours more a day to 24 hours a day.

While the hospitality, tavern, nightclub, and alcohol industries supporting these bills argue that later bar hours will help local economies and increase safety, such bills create unnecessary risk of increased consumption, impaired driving, injuries, crime, violence, noise, and nuisance concerns. They create an extra burden for law enforcement and state and local regulators as well. Excessive alcohol consumption already costs federal, state and local governments $94 billion a year in economic harm; in Nebraska, this cost is $476 million; in Michigan, $3.51 billion; and in Massachusetts, $2.17 billion. The Community Preventative Services Task Force recommends maintaining existing limits, or expanding current limits, on hours of alcohol sales as an effective public health policy to reduce excessive consumption and alcohol-related harm.

Proposals that would extend alcohol availability and increase consumption and harm fly in the face of millions of dollars states already spend on the costs of emergency and medical care, law enforcement, legal and social services due to alcohol-related harm - not to mention noise, trash, and other local problems that communities have to clean up.

Read Alcohol Justice's letter opposing a 2013 California late-night bill here.