As most everyone knows by now, one of the items on the ballot for Tuesday, November 3rd, is a vote whether to have beer and wine sales in the stores in the town of Italy.

We recently received two different copies of a notice that is being distributed around town advocating the beer and wine sales. Those sending this notice are not signing their names to it. This posting intimates an immediate increase of fifty thousand dollars in sales tax of revenues to the city of Italy. That is a lot of sales tax when you figure only a small percentage of the sales tax actually tumbles down to the city.

So lets do the math. Per the state sales tax website the city of Italy can receive 1.5% of the 8.25% sales tax. (6.25% goes to the state and .5% to the EDC). If $3,333,333.00 dollars worth of beer and wine are sold during the year the 1.5% will equal $50,000. That is a lot of beer. At a dollar a bottle that is over 3 million bottles. If 500 citizens of Italy purchase beer; they would need to buy at least 25 bottles a day, six days a week. Ridiculous.

The primary objection this publisher has to the wide open sale of beer and wine is that it makes it far more accessible to the young in this city. At present they have to talk somebody into going into some other city far away and buy the beer and bring it home. If this passes, they simply get one of their older buddies to walk into the grocery store and buy cases of it and bring it out for the kids to use in their parties. This makes it extremely easy to acquire, they simply have to have the money.

In this publisher’s opinion there are far more effective and better ways to acquire money for use in the city. The EDC is working valiantly to try and come up with methods of promoting the City of Italy to make it a better and more productive place to live for our citizens. There is no way that one can argue that beer sales in town will make this town a better place. Please consider this when you vote on Tuesday and those of you sitting on the fence wondering whether they should bother, — get up and go vote.

The anonymous posting sent to us would assume to be something someone wanted printed on Neotrib. There are times when we will do an anonymous posting when we feel that it will jeopardize the person doing the posting. In this case we have no such feeling. Anonymous postings are always dangerous because there is no way of knowing where they come from, or who is promoting them and for what reason.