A private club permit ordinance authorizing a restaurant to apply to serve alcohol didn’t make it past the first reading at Tuesday night’s White County Quorum Court meeting.
Six justices of the peace voted in favor of the motion to approve the first reading for the application by Cantina 64 LLC, which is looking to be located in El Paso, but five voted no and one voted present. Seven yes votes were needed (the majority of the total number of justices on the court) for it to advance to a second reading.
The ordinance, which was sponsored by Justice Chris Boaz, who was absent from the meeting, created quite a stir at the meeting. If passed, the restaurant would have become the first one authorized by the Quorum Court to seek a private club permit from the Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control Division since state legislators changed the law in 2017 to make applicants first have to get permission from their local governing body.
The Quorum Court had previously denied a request in 2024 from a different restaurant that was building in El Paso, Ranchero Loco at 1811 U.S. Highway 64, to change the county’s restrictions to allow a private club inside the limit of 1,500 feet from a church. Cantina 64 would be located at 1255 Highway 64.
Justice Bobby Burns, who is one of the JPs from the Beebe area, told County Judge Lisa Brown that he has studied the ordinance and been contacted by several people and he was “concerned a little about the safety factor.”
He said that according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation that “depending on time of day, there is 10,000 to 22,000 vehicles per day” on that highway. “And adding to that, they are building a 200-lot subdivision out there that’s going to add to the traffic flow out there. I’m paying attention to where it’s at. It may be 30 to 45 minutes before law enforcement can get there. That’s my big concern about this, it’s the location.”
Justice Allen King said his concern was that White County was voted to be a dry county, even though Searcy now has nine restaurants in operation with private club permits, with four more granted to incoming restaurants, and Beebe has two with permits.
“My theory on this is years ago the county was voted dry. I don’t know how many years it has been but it’s been a long time,” King said. “The issue in Searcy, we can’t do nothing about Searcy in the city limits, but we can in the county. People voted it dry years ago and that’s the way they wanted it, and I just have trouble voting for it because of that. That’s what I got to say.”
Justice Joel Pruitt had an issue with the name of the restaurant, saying that Cantina “implies bar.”
“It does not seem proper to be advertising, and I think the alcohol beverage commission also agrees with that unless it has been changed,” Pruitt said. “I also find this ordinance does not indicate who the incorporated agent is, who might be responsible, so we don’t know from this ordinance who is responsible. We also have this procedure [that] indicates this private club should be a nonprofit corporation, and I don’t see anything in this ordinance that implies that it is a nonprofit organization.”
Mike Langley, a former director of the ABC who is representing Cantina 64, told Pruitt that “the last legislative session [in 2025], the law was changed so that a corporation is no longer needed to be nonprofit to operate as a private club in the state of Arkansas. So they are now moving away from that. And people are allowed to file as a corporation. If you have a private club that is a nonprofit corporation, the state passed a law that said it’s part of that state’s law that you will not pay any fee, fine or anything to convert it over.”
“… The ABC requires you to have a managing agent – that’s the person that’s on site all the time, responsible for ‘Are you having a problem with your food?’ ‘Are you having trouble with your drink?’ or any of that,” Langley said. “Now that these are for-profit corporations, you have the incorporator, and we supply the name of the incorporator. We supply the bylaws … the operating agreement so people are disclosed and can be found. That was the intention of my client and me. Nobody wants anybody to be able to hide behind an incorporation and think there’s no liability, because there will be.”
Assistant White County Attorney Daniel Faulkner told Pritchett that if the ABC board does not like something about an application, it is going to reject it.
“Cantina is an accepted name for a restaurant in these communities in the state of Arkansas,” Langley said. “They’ve relaxed it now. You don’t have to put up fences or whiteouts or blackout buildings or do anything like that. All those laws have been changed and relaxed in the last six years. So this is intended to be one – if there is going to be a new subdivision out there – to serve people who are in that subdivision so they don’t have to drive all the way into town to have something that might serve them, to relax and be an amenity toward their dinner and have to worry about that 45-minute drive home.
“They need the ability to serve food, and again as we told you before, alcohol is only an amenity.”
He told the justices they weren’t voting to approve the ordinance that night but only to move it to next month’s meeting for a second reading. Langley said the ordinance had to be read three times before it could have been voted on, noting that the emergency clause had been removed.
“We would just ask for a good vote to give us the opportunity to get to the next reading and continue with the process as it goes,” he said before the vote was taken.
Pritchett told Brown that the law involving private clubs was passed in 2017 by the Legislature because the ABC Division was not recognizing local authority. “As Justice King pointed out, this is a dry county. As Mr. Langley pointed out, the ABC commission continues to relax the rules. So all this points in favor of rejecting this ordinance.”
King told Brown that he would like to give a “for instance.” King said he was not going to mention the name of the restaurant but it involved his son and it was “right here in Searcy.”
King said there were some customers sitting in the back “and this ol’ boy had too much to drink, so they asked him to leave. He was kind of wild, so they asked him to leave. When my son and daughter-in-law walked out the door, this gentleman was standing outside the door and he put a gun to my son’s head and said, ‘Now laugh at me.’ He said, ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you was.’ He said, ‘No, I wasn’t.’”
King said his son told his wife to go to the car. “That boy stood there with a gun to my son’s head. My son finally told him, ‘I’m going to the car. You’re just going to have to do whatever you’re going to have to do.’ Meantime, my daughter-in-law was in the car and she called the cops. She called the cops in Searcy and they come out there and arrested him. It was a BB gun but they told him, ‘if you would have shot him’ … so that’s not my kind of an ordeal when you come out of a restaurant for that to happen.”
Langley said he didn’t want to argue with King but the man could have walked out of a gas station and the same thing could have happened. King said it was not at a gas station, though, but at a restaurant that serves liquor.
“We don’t know that the actual cause is liquor, that’s an assumption,” Langley said. King responded, “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just going to tell you what he done to him.”
King was one of the justices who voted no, along with Jimmy House, Michael Cleveland, Pritchett and Burns. Voting yes were Shane Sellers, David H. Freppon, Charles “Chuck” Lang, Nathan Lincoln, Kenneth Liles and Doug Kennedy. Justice Keith Carlisle voted present.
After the vote, Brown said the ordinance needed “a simple majority” for the first reading to pass, which would be seven of the 13 JPs, “but we have one absent, so I think the motion did fail.” Brown later confirmed that while “there seems to be conflicting statutes,” the motion not passing was the correct interpretation.