A private club permit ordinance authorizing a restaurant to apply to serve alcohol didn\u2019t make it past the first reading at Tuesday night\u2019s White County Quorum Court meeting.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cconcerned a little about the safety factor.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation that \u201cdepending on time of day, there is 10,000 to 22,000 vehicles per day\u201d on that highway. \u201cAnd adding to that, they are building a 200-lot subdivision out there that\u2019s going to add to the traffic flow out there. I\u2019m paying attention to where it\u2019s at. It may be 30 to 45 minutes before law enforcement can get there. That\u2019s my big concern about this, it\u2019s the location.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy theory on this is years ago the county was voted dry. I don\u2019t know how many years it has been but it\u2019s been a long time,\u201d King said. \u201cThe issue in Searcy, we can\u2019t do nothing about Searcy in the city limits, but we can in the county. People voted it dry years ago and that\u2019s the way they wanted it, and I just have trouble voting for it because of that. That\u2019s what I got to say.\u201d<\/p>\n
Justice Joel Pruitt had an issue with the name of the restaurant, saying that Cantina \u201cimplies bar.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt does not seem proper to be advertising, and I think the alcohol beverage commission also agrees with that unless it has been changed,\u201d Pruitt said. \u201cI also find this ordinance does not indicate who the incorporated agent is, who might be responsible, so we don\u2019t 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\u2019t see anything in this ordinance that implies that it is a nonprofit organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Langley, a former director of the ABC who is representing Cantina 64, told Pruitt that \u201cthe 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\u2019s part of that state\u2019s law that you will not pay any fee, fine or anything to convert it over.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c… The ABC requires you to have a managing agent \u2013 that\u2019s the person that\u2019s on site all the time, responsible for \u2018Are you having a problem with your food?\u2019 \u2018Are you having trouble with your drink?\u2019 or any of that,\u201d Langley said. \u201cNow 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\u2019s no liability, because there will be.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cCantina is an accepted name for a restaurant in these communities in the state of Arkansas,\u201d Langley said. \u201cThey\u2019ve relaxed it now. You don\u2019t 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 \u2013 if there is going to be a new subdivision out there \u2013 to serve people who are in that subdivision so they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey need the ability to serve food, and again as we told you before, alcohol is only an amenity.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told the justices they weren\u2019t voting to approve the ordinance that night but only to move it to next month\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d he said before the vote was taken.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
King told Brown that he would like to give a \u201cfor instance.\u201d King said he was not going to mention the name of the restaurant but it involved his son and it was \u201cright here in Searcy.\u201d<\/p>\n
King said there were some customers sitting in the back \u201cand this ol\u2019 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\u2019s head and said, \u2018Now laugh at me.\u2019 He said, \u2018I wasn\u2019t laughing at you.\u2019 He said, \u2018Yeah, you was.\u2019 He said, \u2018No, I wasn\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
King said his son told his wife to go to the car. \u201cThat boy stood there with a gun to my son\u2019s head. My son finally told him, \u2018I\u2019m going to the car. You\u2019re just going to have to do whatever you\u2019re going to have to do.\u2019 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, \u2018if you would have shot him\u2019 … so that\u2019s not my kind of an ordeal when you come out of a restaurant for that to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Langley said he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know that the actual cause is liquor, that\u2019s an assumption,\u201d Langley said. King responded, \u201cI\u2019m not going to argue with you. I\u2019m just going to tell you what he done to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cChuck\u201d Lang, Nathan Lincoln, Kenneth Liles and Doug Kennedy. Justice Keith Carlisle voted present.<\/p>\n
After the vote, Brown said the ordinance needed \u201ca simple majority\u201d for the first reading to pass, which would be seven of the 13 JPs, \u201cbut we have one absent, so I think the motion did fail.\u201d Brown later confirmed that while \u201cthere seems to be conflicting statutes,\u201d the motion not passing was the correct interpretation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A private club permit ordinance authorizing a restaurant to apply to serve alcohol didn\u2019t make it past the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139,66,223],"class_list":["post-342513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-local","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}