Mysterious Ballot Measure to Privatize Liquor Sales Crosses Another Threshold

Here’s the title: “Eligible retailers and wholesalers may be licensed to sell distilled liquor; retailers taxed on sales.”

Anybody who wants to challenge that title now has until Aug. 19 to do so at the Oregon Supreme Court. 

Getting a ballot title is a key step toward gathering the 117,173 valid signatures the state requires for the initiative to appear on the November 2026 ballot. Privatizing hard liquor sales — which currently fall under the purview of the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission — has been a hot-button issue for years. Washington voters privatized liquor sales in that state in 2011, and Oregon grocers have tried to do the same repeatedly since, without success. So in one sense, it’s not surprising to see IP 43 moving toward the ballot.

But almost nothing else about the initiative is normal. 

For instance, in the ballot title process, the only group that made comments, the Oregon Beer & Wine Distributors Association, and the Department of Justice both noted that the language in IP 43 is a carbon copy of an unsuccessful 2022 initiative backed by the Northwest Grocery Retail Association, whose members would like to sell hard liquor. 

“IP 43 is identical to IP 35 (2022), and the draft ‘yes’ result statement is identical to the [2022] ballot title certified without modification by the Oregon Supreme Court,” DOJ lawyer Shannon Teel wrote in an Aug. 5 letter explaining certification of the ballot title. 

Northwest Grocery Retail Association CEO Amanda Dalton says her organization has nothing to do with the measure and did not give the chief petitioners, David John Allison and Kyle LoCascio, both of Portland, permission to use the 2022 language. 

“Still no outreach or contact from them,” Dalton said in a text message Aug. 8. “We don’t know who they are.” 

Unlike typical proponents of a ballot measure, the petitioners behind IP 43 have neither established a website to communicate with voters, nor have they taken the basic step of establishing a political action committee with the Oregon Secretary of State’s Elections Division. That is a step that five initiatives filed after IP 43 have already taken, and it’s a prerequisite for raising and spending the kind of money it takes to gather more than 100,000 valid voter signatures. 

In a brief phone conversation, LoCascio, who has previous experience with ballot initiatives, said he couldn’t provide any information about who’s likely to fund IP 43 or offer any other campaign details — saying only that he hopes to share more after the Aug. 19 deadline for any ballot title appeal. 

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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project (oregonjournalismproject.org), a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon.