ZEELAND, Mich. — A once-dry city is now working to modernize their alcohol regulations even further.
The City of Zeeland was one of the last dry cities in Michigan before they legalized alcohol sales in 2006. Fast forward to today, as city officials want to make alcohol even more accessible to community members and businesses.
"City council and staff made it an annual goal that we would take this year to really pursue the changes that we've been talking about for a few years now," said Abby deRoo, Zeeland's Marketing Director.
Those changes are to Zeeland's alcohol ordinance, which has been in place for 15 years.
"We just want to make sure that we're competitive with other areas, as well as trying to even out some of our requirements to be level with the State of Michigan's requirements," said deRoo.
City council is proposing nine changes to the current set of rules. Some of those include no longer putting a cap on how many businesses can have a liquor license. Currently, it's only four.
"We have active businesses who are interested in licenses," said deRoo, "we need to make those adjustments so that our own brick and mortar businesses could apply for one."
Another proposed change would be lowering the age that someone can serve alcohol. Right now, you have to be 21 in Zeeland to serve, but they want to lower it to 18, which matches the state's requirements.
"In today's employee shortage, any barrier that we can remove for our local businesses for them to be able to attract staff will be helpful," deRoo said.
The city is also proposing they get rid of certain requirements for a license like the number of seats and the size of an establishment.
"We want to get rid of some of these hard restrictions that might deter somebody from using one of the buildings or even looking at Zeeland in general," said deRoo.
Sunday alcohol sales are still banned in Zeeland, which deRoo said reflects the city's conservative history.
"We've grown a little bit since then," said deRoo, "and we've seen how it has added to our local businesses by helping them engage with the community a little bit more."
"The licenses that we've had, past or present, have been great assets to our community," she added.
Zeeland City Council members will vote on the alcohol ordinance changes on Monday, Dec. 20.
You can read more about the proposed changes in the documents here: