Introduction to MLCC On The Road

Welcome to the MLCC On The Road podcast.  In our inaugural episode, we'll introduce our hosts - Sara Weber, Licensing Division Director and David Marvin, Executive Services Division Director - and we'll learn about the MLCC On The Road program.

We thank the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association (NABCA) for providing financial assistance for the MLCC On The Road program through an education grant.

Hosts: Sara Weber and David Marvin

The MLCC On The Road podcast is brought to you by the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC). For more information on the MLCC, please visit our website at www.michigan.gov/lcc. To submit a question or idea for a podcast topic, please email mlccinfo2@michigan.gov.

The mission of the Michigan Liquor Control Commission is to make alcoholic beverages available for consumption while protecting the consumer and the general public through regulation of those involved in the sale and distribution of these alcohol beverage products.

Transcript

Speaker 01: 0:00

You're listening to the MLCC On The Road Podcast, brought to you by the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. Hello, Sara. Welcome to our first MLCC on the road podcast. And we're going to talk today a little bit about what MLCC on the road is all about and what we intend for this podcast. Why don't you introduce yourself and I'll introduce myself and we'll talk a little bit about what we're planning on doing here.

Speaker 00: 0:30

My name is Sara Weber and I am the licensing director for the Liquor Control Commission.

Speaker 01: 0:34

And I'm David Marvin, and I am the Director of the Executive Services Division at the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. But before we get started, I wanna ask a little bit about you. What is your history with the MLCC? And tell me a little bit about your background here.

Speaker 00: 0:51

All right, well, I have been with the Commission going on 24 years now. I started with the Commission working as a kind of a temporary employee in our records division. And I worked my way up. I put myself through college and am now the licensing director here. So I have worked in most of the departments in licensing, so I have a pretty strong background in how we do what we do and training and providing supervision to our staff. I hired you, so I think I did pretty well. Well, I hope so. But yeah, I think growing up in the Commission, I think it's given me a very good overview of how far we've come in the last 20 years and the trends and what we're seeing now and the continued growth in the state of Michigan. Why don't you give us a little bit more of your background, David?

Speaker 01: 1:49

Well, as you touched on, you did hire me about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago, back in September of 2014. I had come over from the Michigan Legislature where I had worked for about 20 years, working for some senators and representatives over that period of time handling legislation. I surprisingly actually touched a little bit on liquor control legislation while I was over there. So it was kind of an interesting fit coming over here. But I hired in as an analyst and you who were there interviewing me that day and you took a shot on me and look where we're at now. Over the... last few years, the last 10 years, I advanced into a deputy director working for you in licensing. And then more recently here in the last four years, I transitioned over as a deputy director in the Executive Services Division. And then now I'm the director here in the Executive Services Division as of earlier this year. So it's been a very fast set of events. Yeah, transition, not over 20 a year period, but over a 10 year period. But it has been fun to get to know you and the staff here at the MLCC and to be a part of this bigger MLCC family.

Speaker 00: 3:04

And we work very closely together between our divisions. There is, other than Licensing Division and executive services, we also have a finance division and an enforcement division. Maybe one day we'll let them join us on one of these podcasts and they can kind of give their background and stories too. I'm sure there's a lot of people who'd like to hear more about what those divisions are as well. But I'm glad we're able to do this this morning. And

Speaker 01: 3:32

Yeah, and it's funny because the Licensing Division, they end up handling all the applications that come in. And my division, executive services, you don't really a lot of times want to deal with my division because we're the people that process all the violations and appeals from denials. So we're kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum here of what we do. And then our finance folks handle all of our money and the enforcement folks write a lot of those violations, but they also do the investigation. So we're all kind of tied together in one big happy family, though we do have kind of different expectations that each division handles. So as we're talking about the MLCC On The Road podcast and then MLCC On The Road in general, let's talk a little bit about how we came up with the MLCC On The Road concept and where we got some funding from that. We got a grant from the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, or what we typically call NABCA. And tell us a little bit about that, Sara.

Speaker 00: 4:36

NABCA that you mentioned, they provide a lot of resources throughout the United States to all of the controlled states, of which Michigan is one of them. I can't remember how many controlled states we have. I think we're at 17. 17? Okay. I can never quite remember the exact count, but Michigan is one. We're a little bit different than the other controlled states, too, in the way that we handle the sales of spirits in the state and our wholesalers for beer and wine. We are kind of on our own island when it comes to how that is sold and shipped throughout. And we can talk about that a little bit more at a different time. Through that grant with NABCA, we sit on one of the committees for education, and we talked about wanting to be able to get out and talk to people in the community a little bit more, answer questions, and basically give our customers and our licensees an avenue for them to be heard. A lot of times people are calling our office, they have general questions, but they may not be able to get quite as in-depth in those conversations as we would like or as maybe they would like. So we were looking for an opportunity to basically reach out to the community a little bit on a different, deeper level, and that's where NABCA came in and provided us with a grant. This all came about Thanks for watching. about a year, two years ago now. We went and visited a community in Lake City. They had asked, actually, I think our business manager had been in conversations with a couple of businesses out there, as well as the local unit of government, the township.

Speaker 01: 6:26

I think it was a city or village council.

Speaker 00: 6:28

Yes. They had specific questions as well. So they had asked for a meeting. And that was kind of our jumping off points for the ML CC on the Road, and kind of where that idea came into play and where that grant ended up coming from. And I'll let David touch on this a little bit more.

Speaker 01: 6:46

And we've been, I think we counted, we've had a busy year with a lot of other things going on, so we haven't gotten to as many places we wanted to go. But I know we've had in the last year, we've gone to at least five, and I vaguely think there's a sixth one in there. I know we've visited a number of places around Michigan where we've gone and actually had these, kind of more of a town hall meeting where we come and it's our leadership team essentially for the Liquor Control Commission that's going out and having these face-to-face conversations and we're able to have pretty frank conversations and we're getting questions that people may not ever think to call and ask and walking away with answers that hopefully they're able to take back and implement and do things in their businesses and understand how they can do things. So let's use the example of Lake City, that was actually a really interesting first event that we had. We had the city council folks there and a number of licensees. And they had questions about social districts. How do they get a social district together? So that was more of the village council wanting to know what do we need to do to pass because they had interest from their licensees. We had one gentleman who has a distillery in Lake City that asked a question about self-distribution. And for those of you who aren't aware of what self-distribution is, it's where a manufacturer makes the product and they themselves distribute it to the retailers as opposed to going through a wholesaler or the Commission for spirits. I wanted to know a couple of questions about that. And it got us thinking that, you know, if he's asking this question, how many other people are asking this question? And so we came back, and within a few weeks, we had a dedicated spot on our website that is there just for self-distribution questions. It has all the requirements for whether it's beer, wine, spirits, mixed beer, drink. It has some calculators so that you know how to do pricing for spirits. It has all the tax forms you have to fill out. It says what a salesperson license you need, if you need a vehicle decal for the delivery vehicle. All that came out of a conversation that we had sitting around a table or in this case it was kind of a big open room with a number of people asking questions that we wouldn't have necessarily thought to ask ourselves. And so it's a learning experience for us. We actually hope that we walk away from these events having learned just as much as the people that came and asked us the questions. And we often happen, I know this happened all the time, you get done with the part where everybody's talking and then we have staff that will essentially just kind of break off and go talk to individuals who may have that question that they didn't feel comfortable asking in in front of everybody else. And it's additional time that we spend with people. And some of the things that we've fixed by doing that. I mean, where they may have a specific question about their specific license that they need assistance on, we've been able to help them out on that. And it's been an amazing thing. If we had more time, it would be almost a full-time job to go do this, but it's been a really beneficial thing for us to learn and to get out of the office and for them to see us and be able to ask those questions.

Speaker 00: 10:03

Absolutely. I think that the... The time that we're able to dedicate to this when we are able to get out and do this has been just so helpful for like David mentioned, not only us, but for the people out there looking to establish businesses or have questions or issues that they need to work through. And, you know, it kind of opens our eyes to other possible changes in our code or our laws or why we have certain things in place the way we have and being able to explain that to people so they understand it or even if they don't really like it, they can see where we're coming from or how our hands are tied, you know, because At the end of the day, we are a business. They are a business. We're not just state government in this role. We are a partner in the business, and that's where it's a lot or very different from other state government offices. we play a huge role in not only licensing you, but we also benefit just as much as our customers do in the sale of alcohol. You know, the state does as a whole, not the Liquor Control Commission, but the state.

Speaker 01: 11:19

Last fiscal year, 2023, I don't know the 2024 numbers, through all of the taxes and the sale of spirits and licensing fees, the amount of money general fund that we give back to the taxpayers of Michigan, was about, I believe it was in the $440 million range. And that doesn't include a whole lot of money, about $200 million that goes specifically to certain things. Some of it goes to the school aid fund. Some of it goes to local communities for law enforcement. Some of it goes to alcoholism programs through Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Agriculture gets a little bit of it to work with craft manufacturers. And so that's money that is coming in and it's benefitting... Yeah, it's benefiting.

Speaker 00: 12:12

It's going back out to the state.

Speaker 01: 12:15

Going into our roads. It's going into our schools. It's going into a variety of things out there. And so, yeah, we are partners. It's not just us as a state agency saying, here's what you need to do. The law tells us that certain things have to go that way. But we are also a partner in this in that we want to see success with our licensees. I think that's something that we've talked a a lot about internally lately is that we want to do more education before we have to do the regulation part of it. We'd rather be able to walk you through and help you do it right than to have something happen where you don't know and something happens and it's not something that's legal that can be done under the code.

Speaker 00: 12:56

We want to see you in business. We don't want to keep you or prevent you from being able to open timely or not at all or having to wait unnecessarily long. These are all things that on a daily basis in addition to the education component that we are looking at trying to do as a partner of yours.

Speaker 01: 13:15

Which brings us to this podcast. Obviously we can't be everywhere all the time, anytime. And you and I have talked about a lot of neat ideas that we've wanted to talk about over the years and just how could you get that information out to people. And so we've devised this idea that in addition to the actually on the road portion of MLCC On The Road, we're gonna do this podcast. And it's something that we can have some conversations with people that are in the industry, people here that are in MLCC that we can have different topics we're going to talk about and maybe get some information out there that our listeners wouldn't have even thought to ask, but said, hey, that's something that I need to remember because at some day I may need something like that. And it's a new experience that we're going to have here. It's an experiment. And we hope that folks will listen in and that we will have something that will be of use to them down the road. But that's kind of where we're coming from on this podcast. And it's not going to just be Sara and me talking all the time. We're going to bring people

Speaker 00: 14:25

in that know this. Yeah. We'll bring more entertainment and more entertaining people, and then definitely we have... a bunch of topics that we've thought about over the years that we'd like to have. But if there's anything that you as a listener would like to hear, we would love to know or love to hear from you as well. And we will definitely try to work something in as far as information or a podcast dedicated to that. But we're looking forward to it and we're excited for the opportunity.

Speaker 01: 14:53

Yeah. Well, Sara, thank you for joining me. And I know this is going to be a fun experience that we're going to have here. And hopefully it'll be of value. And we'll be back soon with another MLCC On The Road podcast. And other than that, have a wonderful day. Thank you. The MLCC On The Road podcast was brought to you by the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. For more information on the Michigan Liquor Control Commission, please visit our website at michigan.gov michigan.gov/lcc. Thank you for listening.