Hosey: Let’s raise a glass to gas station gambling

After nine long years, happy days are finally here again.

For the first time since 2012, you can buy a single bottle or can of beer at any one of three downtown liquor stores.

That’s right, drinkers had been deprived of buying just one beer from all three of those liquor stores. It’s true that there was no law stopping you from buying a bottle or can of beer at the rest of the liquor stores around Joliet, but if you wanted to patronize one of the three in the city’s downtown, you were out of luck.

The ban on selling single containers of beer was enacted to curb the public consumption of alcohol in Joliet’s city center. But the city council recently repealed that prohibition and cleared the way for buying as much beer as you want, one bottle or can at a time. Let the good times roll.

And this isn’t wonderful news just for connoisseurs of quart cans or 40-ounce bottles of beer. Downtown liquor store owners will also benefit from a lucrative trade they had been so long denied.

Once again allowing downtown liquor stores to sell beer a bottle or can at a time is a win-win for everyone and a welcome development, especially in light of the threat of bars and video gambling machines popping up in all of Joliet’s gas stations now that the city council allowed for such operations at the Thorntons at the corner of Collins and Jackson streets.

In the city council’s defense, clearing the way for Thorntons to sell alcohol to be consumed at the gas station and install video gambling was done to save a 19th century building that’s supposed to be a historic mansion and would have otherwise been demolished. Thorntons also paid more than $300,000 to move the supposedly historic mansion down the road a bit and out of the way.

So history was preserved, but at what price? At least one member of the council saw the transaction as less than ideal.

“I will not support anything that allows people to stand there and drink at a gas pump, in a gas station,” Councilman Larry Hug proclaimed. And he may have a point. But as bad as it might be to drink near a gas pump, it has to be much safer than smoking near one. We have that much to be thankful for.

Smoking and drinking by gas pumps aside, the larger problem seems to be that since Thorntons got the go-ahead to operate video gambling machines, it seems as if nearly every gas station owner in town wants to run a gaming parlor of their own, and at least one, Terry Lambert, looks like he going to get his way.

In a city with two casinos and gambling machines practically everywhere, you have to wonder how much a business stands to gain. Curiouser still, after wrangling with the city for months and finally getting its way in January, the Thorntons at Collins and Jackson still doesn’t have any gaming machines.

Did Thorntons pay $300,000 for nothing? To make matters worse, the supposedly historic mansion is still sitting down the street, neglected and falling further into disrepair as the Will County Historical Society doesn’t seem to have the money to fix it up, which doesn’t make any sense at all.

If the historical society is so strapped, they should just take Thorntons’ gambling machines and run them out of the mansion. It’s not like the gas station is using them, and that way you can get all the drinkers away from the pumps.

• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.