Should beer and wine be sold on Sundays? Florence County wants voters to decide. (2024)

FLORENCE — Florence County residents may soon be able to buck tradition and purchase a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine on Sundays.

County Council is poised to put a referendum on the November ballot allowing voters to decide whether beer and wine should be sold seven days a week.

The county is one of seven in South Carolina that continues to prohibit the practice, which was once common across the state and commonly referred to as blue laws. The others are Aiken, Barnwell, Cherokee, Dillon, Hampton, Sumter and Union.

Council Chairman William Schofield, who proposed the referendum, framed it as giving voters a say on an important policy question.

“That’s not a choice that government should be making for its citizens. Its citizens should be making that choice at the ballot box,” he said in an interview.

Schofield is in favor of Sunday sales. He helped pass a similar referendum in 2022 in the city of Florence when he was a City Council member. Voters approved that proposal with 67 percent of the vote.

The county’s effort is part of a growing movement to put aside longstanding laws that prevent alcohol from being sold on Sundays in the Palmetto State. That includes referendums in cities and counties across South Carolina, as well as legislation at the Statehouse.

County Council voted 7-2 in June to approve a countywide referendum. It must still pass a final time in July.

Florence, Lake City and Johnsonville have passed similar referendums already.

Along with Schofield, council members who voted in favor of the proposal included Jason Springs, Roger Poston, Alphonso Bradley, Kent Caudle, Stoney “Toney” More and Waymon Mumford.

Jerry Yarborough and Willard Dorriety opposed it.

Schofield said having some places in the county where it’s legal to sell beer and wine on Sundays and some places where it’s not can be confusing. It’s not always clear to customers where the dividing line is.

He also said it’s not the government’s place to tell business owners when they can sell certain items or to tell customers when they can buy them.

Rick Havekost, who owns the local liquor store chain Micky Finn’s, said passing the referendum would be a boon to business and tax revenue.

He pointed to Buc-ee’s and the Micky Finn’s location that recently opened at the Interstate 95 interchange. He watches numerous people try to buy alcohol on Sundays only to be turned away, he said.

Those are tax dollars that Florence County is simply sending down the road.

“Why are we sending people one mile down the street … to buy in Darlington? You didn’t stop anybody from doing it. You simply made them go somewhere else,” he said.

Yarborough, one of the two councilmen who voted against the proposal, said his primary concern is safety. As a volunteer firefighter, he’s seen the consequences of drunken driving first hand. He worries that allowing more access to alcohol on Sundays could exacerbate the problem.

“It’s concerning to me because I don’t know what the effects will be,” Yarborough said.

Like Yarborough, Dorriety said he was concerned about substance abuse.

Dorriety also said it’s unnecessary to allow sales on Sundays when they’re already allowed every other day of the week.

“I think Sunday is one day you could do without it,” he said.

Both men said that if there were truly a groundswell of support for Sunday sales, County Council should have allowed voters to bring forth a petition signed by 5,000 people to trigger a referendum. A unilateral decision by County Council is not the right path forward, they said.

“I would feel a lot better if you’d had 5,000 citizens,” Yarborough said. “… 5,000 is not a hard number to come up with. But that’s not exactly how it was introduced to us.”

Schofield said he takes concerns about substance abuse seriously, but he doesn’t think that introducing Sunday sales will affect those issues.

“There are plenty of people that abuse alcohol every day irregardless of whether they have access to it six days a week or seven days a week,” he said. “That’s where we as a community come together to try and bring support to those individuals.”

County Council will hold the final reading at its July 18 meeting. If it passes, the referendum will go on the Nov. 5 general election ballot.