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Salud!: Because Buzz figures anyone who reads us is drunk, this week we take another look at Progress Dallas’ effort to secure a vote to change the dry laws in the city. The group—led by retailers and restaurateurs—wants to allow beer and wine sales in grocery stores and eliminate rules that require restaurants that serve booze in dry areas to collect identifying information on drinkers.
When Progress Dallas announced last month that it would collect signatures on petitions calling for a citywide vote on the rules, the group revealed it would use a professional firm, Texas Petition Strategies, to do the collecting. The use of hired guns to manage petition drives has been contentious in previous elections, so we wondered just who TPS was.
Here’s what we learned: If you’re a drinker in Texas, you should raise a glass to Sissy Day and John Hatch, the political consultants behind Texas Petition Strategies. (Yeah, Buzz is being effusive. We really like beer.)
Day and Hatch have been running TPS for about eight years, and business has been booming since 2003, when the Texas Legislature changed the requirements for calling alcohol elections. Before then, Hatch says, it was difficult to get a vote on the ballot.
For example, before the change, those petitioning for booze in their communities had 30 days to get signatures equaling 35 percent of all registered voters in their jurisdiction. In Dallas, that would be roughly 185,000 signatures, versus the 70,000 or so needed for the current effort, since the law now requires only 35 percent of the number of voters who cast ballots in the previous gubernatorial election.
“It was easier to run for president of the United States than to have an alcohol election,” Hatch says of the old rules. Explains a lot.
The changes also removed some onerous requirements about how exactly petitions must be signed and made it possible for cities that straddle multiple counties to have citywide elections. There are 116 multi-county cities in Texas that, like Dallas, are at least partially dry, Hatch says.
The effects have been phenomenal for boozehounds (and the sales taxes we pay). Between 1993 and 2003 there were 99 wet/dry elections, he says. Since then, there have been 435. Dallas’ is the 100th petition drive for TPS, Day says, and the company has had a 100 percent success rate for its petitions and an 85 percent win rate in elections.
“If we allow these elections to become about the morals of alcohol, we lose,” Hatch says. “If we make it about economics, we win.”
