ALCOHOL MEASURES MAY GET TOUGHER.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

PALMDALE - City officials are considering stiffening municipal alcohol sales regulations to make them apply to supermarkets, drug stores and restaurants or to keep businesses that sell alcohol farther apart.

City officials say they are concerned about the number of businesses that sell alcohol in Palmdale, and want to have regulations in place as the city continues to grow.

``I think the ordinance does warrant some additional measures. When you take the concentration that presently exists, if you extrapolate that out to build-out. we would certainly have more liquor outlets than we would want here,'' Mayor James Ledford said this week.

After a discussion of alcohol-sales regulations Wednesday night at a joint City Council-Planning Commission meeting, staffers are drawing up possible changes to the 8-year-old ordinance.

``We'll take a look at what other cities are doing,'' Planning Director Laurie Lile said Friday.

The proposed changes could be released to the public in a month or two, and then would be scheduled for public hearings before the Planning Commission and City Council, Lile said.

City officials could decide not to drop the existing exemptions for grocery stores, drug stores and restaurants, but might include definitions of the exempted categories, Lile said. For example, the law does not define what a grocery store is, she said.

Some cities set a limit of 1,000 feet between alcohol-selling businesses and homes, schools or churches, Lile said. Palmdale's ordinance, adopted in 1994, bans bars, liquor stores and convenience stores from opening within 300 feet of homes or of each other, within 500 feet of churches and schools, and within 1,000 feet of sexually oriented businesses.

A longtime Palmdale activist said he was pleased that city officials are considering rewriting the law. City regulations need to be changed to give local officials jurisdiction over more businesses whose alcohol sales cause a nuisance, said Ray Chavira, a retired juvenile probation officer and former member of the Los Angeles County Commission on Alcoholism.

``We've got a proliferation of small restaurants. It's small restaurants that are the biggest purveyors in problems,'' Chavira said. ``There's nothing that can prevent a fast-food business from applying for a beer-wine license.''

All alcohol retailers are subject to regulations from the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board, but activists say the board has too few investigators to properly police all the businesses under its jurisdiction.

State law sets limits on what restrictions cities can put on businesses that sell alcohol. For example, they cannot ban gasoline stations from selling alcohol.

But cities can limit the locations of the businesses, regulate the hours they can sell and set other requirements.

City planners spent more than a year hearing public testimony and drafting the regulations before the 1994 adoption.

The 1994 law requires convenience stores and any business geared primarily toward alcohol sales, such as liquor stores and bars, to undergo a public hearing before the Planning Commission and obtain a conditional use permit before they can open.