“It’s Just a Piece of Paper”: Inside Pittsfield’s $25K Liquor License Market

I sat down with Mayor Peter Marchetti on the show today, and we got into something a lot of people don't think about: liquor licenses. It came up because of two new spots opening downtown, Aura Coffee and Cocktails and the soon to open The Grand on North Street. Naturally I asked him how many licenses the city actually has room for.

Turns out there's a cap, and it goes back decades. Marchetti told me that sometime around the '90s, maybe even earlier, the state passed a law limiting how many liquor licenses a city could hand out based on population. For Pittsfield, that number works out to 45.

Here's the catch. Pittsfield currently has 54 licenses in circulation, nine more than the cap allows. How? Grandfathering. Any license that existed before the cap took effect gets to stick around, as long as it stays active and valid. But if a business closes and doesn't sell or transfer its license, that license can go back to the state, and the city loses it for good.

Marchetti said there's legislation moving right now that would give cities and towns more local control over how many licenses they can issue and how the whole process works. No word yet on when or if that passes.

In the meantime, licenses can be bought and sold, either with a business or on their own, for whatever price the market will bear. Marchetti said the average price right now is around $25,000. However, people can ask for as much money as they want for them!

I asked Marchetti with humor what a liquor license looked like and he said "a piece of paper".

In terms of pricing, "it's a supply and demand thing", said Marchetti who joins us once a month on Live 95.9.