Members of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board speak among themselves after a meeting on Nov. 14, 2024. The Board passed updated rules regarding online training. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
The Alabama Alcohol Beverage Control Board Thursday approved rules for training alcohol servers, an approval that a state senator said would be critical to allow state contracts to move forward.
The rules, unanimously approved by the board, set requirements for how vendors may train their employees online on the rules related to serving alcohol.
After the vote, Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, released holds he placed on contracts during last week’s Contract Review Committee meeting.
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“That should accommodate what I was asking for,” Elliott said in a conference call with the media following the meeting. “I had worked with the restaurants, hospitality and grocers to talk about what their needs were when we were drafting the legislation. Those rule changes ought to be sufficient to allow them to find a commercially viable, commercially available product to work with.”
Elliott last week accused the board of not complying with a state law that he had sponsored regulating training for 18 to 20-year-olds serving alcohol in certain places.
The legislation expanded the locations where those servers, who cannot legally purchase alcohol, could serve it, such as hotels and restaurants. It also required restaurants and hotels covered under the law to be certified annually with the “Responsible Vendor” program.
To be certified, vendors needed to offer training to employees on the rules pertaining to serving alcohol. In the past, people had to be physically present at the location where they took the exam. Elliott’s bill allows the exam to be done online.
Curtis Stewart, administrator of the ABC Board, said after the meeting that it was a “voluntary program” that could ease punishments if minors purchase alcohol from those establishments.
“It gives them some mitigation of their fines if they show they trained their people, and if they show us they have trained their people and maintained records of their training, and if they do it for all the people who come in,” he said.
Among the suggestions made by the Association, and one the Board adopted, is that individuals taking the exam do not need to be shown the correct answer to a specific question, only the score and whether they received a passing score.
The rule changes will go through a period of public comment before being implemented.
Stewart said after Thursday’s meeting that the agency had been offering the training online during the coronavirus pandemic, before Elliott’s bill became law. The Alabama Restaurant and Hospitality Association wanted the state policy changed to allow for training online, and the ABC Board agreed, according to Stewart.
Among the suggestions made by the Association, and one the Board adopted, is that individuals taking the exam do not need to be shown the correct answer to a specific question, only the score and whether they received a passing score.
The rule changes will go through a period of public comment before being implemented.
“The change that they wanted was for us to go ahead with a rule that says how you do the online training,” Stewart said. “It previously said you could do it; it didn’t put in any real barriers on how you did it. This rule basically puts more guidelines out there that says you have to do it this way or this way.”
The contracts Elliott held included several legal services agreements the state had negotiated for different lawsuits, including several involving the Alabama Department of Corrections.
According to the Alabama Daily News, Elliott released a handful of contracts as of Friday, including one from the Attorney General’s Office, although it is unclear which of the contracts the agency presented was released.
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