An update from Free The Hops on the latest legislative effort to allow premium beer to be sold in Alabama:
“A lot has happened since the last newsletter.
On February 11, our bill passed the Senate Tourism and Marketing Committee unanimously. It is now on the Senate floor and awaiting debate by the full body.
On February 18, several of us went to Montgomery to speak in favor of the Gourmet Beer Bill to the House Tourism and Travel Committee. It passed that body unanimously as well and moved to the full house for debate. We also hosted legislators and staff at a reception where we could discuss the benefits of our agenda.
Of course the big news is that we passed the full House on Tuesday, March 3. The vote was 49-37 for final passage. That is an improvement over last year and a couple legislators voted Yes on our bill for the first time. I really want to thank everyone who contacted their representatives going into the vote. I know it made a difference, especially in some key districts.
If you want to see the voting margins for previous years, our prediction for the Senate, and how your own legislator voted, check out our Legislative page. Dan Roberts has imported all the information from the vote. If you’re looking for a quicker summary of our progress just this year, our webmistress has created this page for people to check in on.
Also, we tried using Twitter for live updates during the House debate on our bill and picked up a couple hundred followers. You can follow us on Twitter as well. This will give you instant updates on the progress of our legislation.
So now we just have to pass the full Senate and we go to the Governor, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. In fact, it’s complicated, and we may end up having to re-pass the House. I want to keep this newsletter brief, so I’ll direct those interested in the boring details of the legislative process to Danner Kline’s blog entry about it.
Either way, we are now at the same point we were at last year and we still have two-thirds of the legislative session left. Assuming the Alabama Senate continues its relatively orderly pace, there’s a lot of reason to expect us to be successful this year.”
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