With debates currently ongoing in Trenton over whether and how to reform New Jersey’s liquor license laws, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll released today finds that New Jerseyans are broadly supportive of loosening restrictions on licenses.
Under current New Jersey law, towns are permitted only one liquor license for bars and restaurants per 3,000 residents, which results in some recreation-heavy towns having too few liquor licenses to meet demand while other towns’ licenses go unused. Gov. Phil Murphy has made reforming the laws a key priority this year, calling the current situation “antiquated and confusing.”
And it appears New Jerseyans generally agree with him. 72% of poll respondents said that small towns should be given additional retail consumption licenses, while just 24% said they should not; 57%, meanwhile, were supportive of allowing towns to give existing unused licenses to other towns in the same county, versus 35% who were opposed.
Support for both policies was consistent across partisan, gender, racial, economic, and generational lines.
“One thing New Jerseyans seem to agree upon these days is revamping the state’s liquor license laws – an issue that even cuts across party lines,” said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, in a release accompanying the poll.
Two other reforms related to breweries also proved relatively uncontroversial: 92% of respondents said breweries should have a “greater ability to serve food on their premises,” and 63% supported lifting restrictions on how many events breweries can hold per year.
One policy, however, was more closely divided. A complaint from existing license holders is that loosening the laws would make their own licenses less valuable; a proposal to give them a $30,000 to $50,000 tax credit to offset the loss of value was met with 45% approval, 42% disapproval.
“Residents’ sole hesitancy, unsurprisingly, is with tax credits for current license holders, which is in line with the broader narrative of New Jerseyans not wanting anything to ultimately impact their own wallet,” Koning said.
The Rutgers-Eagleton Poll was in the field from April 27-May 5 with a sample size of approximately 500 New Jersey adults. The liquor license questions were part of a larger poll of 1,002 New Jersey adults with a margin of error of +/- 3.6%; it’s not clear what the margin of error is on the smaller subsample.