FORT KENT, Maine — Approximately five years ago, police in Aroostook County realized that they had a huge problem with businesses in the region selling alcohol to minors.
Compliance checks conducted in March 2011, for instance, revealed that 23 of 43 businesses from Macwahoc to Fort Kent sold alcohol to minors. All of the businesses were summoned for violations by the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office. But less than two years later, in November 2012, more than 70 percent of the 40 or so businesses that were checked by the department violated the law.
“It was quite a shock,” Michelle Plourde Chasse, project manager of Community Voices, a countywide organization that works to curb substance abuse among youth, said Tuesday. “That was a real eye opener for us, and we knew that we had to take action.
That is exactly what the organization did, and working together with area law enforcement, they began instituting state certified training to businesses and employees across The County. Plourde Chasse said Tuesday that the training has helped “significantly improve” the results of the compliance checks.
According to the project manager, of the 109 checks conducted in 2015, fifteen liquor licensees engaged in an illegal sale to a minor. That equaled out to a failure rate of 14 percent..
“It has been nice to see that failure rate go down,” said Plourde Chasse.
The compliance checks are done by the Aroostook County Compliance Task Force, which consists of law enforcement officers from across the region and is spearheaded by the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff’s Capt. Ross McQuade is a member of the task force. He said that businesses are randomly checked for compliance at least once per year. He said that the task force has a young adult under age 21 go into the store and request alcohol. When they are asked for their date of birth or identification, they are truthful about their date of birth and tell the cashier that they do not have their identification.
“There is no deception involved,’ said Mcquade.
“The businesses that do fail the compliance checks typically fail it when they move forward with the transaction anyway instead of telling the young person that they can’t sell it to them because they don’t have their identification with them,” he said.
Plourde Chasse said that Community Voices contracts with a liquor enforcement veteran who comes up from southern Maine to conduct a five hour class for businesses and their employees twice a year. The classes are held in various geographic areas to make it easier for as many people to attend as possible.
She said that she believes that businesses were failing the compliance checks in the past for a number of reasons.
“I think that it was a combination of a lack of consistent checks, a lackadaisical attitude about selling liquor to minors, and a lack of training.”
McQuade said that he also believes that education and “a change in the level of awareness about the seriousness of selling to minors” is fueling the drop in the failure rate.
While in the past the compliance checks have focused on “off premise” sites such as convenience stores and gas stations, they are currently conducting more checks on “on premise sites,” such as bars and taverns.
The compliance work and training has been coordinated through programs of Healthy Aroostook and Power of Prevention, with funding from the Maine Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services.
Plourde Chasse said that the eventual goal is to have a less than 5 percent failure rate for businesses in The County.
