Walker City Officials Respond to Petition Against Sale of Municipal Liquor Store

After the Walker City Council decided to sell the municipal liquor store in late July to Miner’s Inc., a family-owned chain of about 30 stores across parts of the Midwest, some residents want to have a say in the matter.

Organizers gathered signatures for a petition to have a vote on the sale of the store, Walker Bay Spirits, to Miner’s, which owns Super One Foods and Liquor. Now, they say they’re feeling ignored.

“For the city to just to be like, ‘These voices don’t matter’, it just doesn’t seem right,” said Tyler Anderson, a Walker resident who secured signatures for the petition. “People went to the meetings. They said, ‘Don’t do it.’ The city asked for advice. Everyone told them not to do it, and they’re doing it anyways. It just seems very strange that they’re just willing to ignore everybody.”

A petition needs 169 signatures of registered voters living in the city in order to be considered. Walker residents secured 220 signatures on their petition, but the Walker City Council determined that none of those signatures could be verified.

“Half of the names we couldn’t read; their addresses weren’t listed,” said Walker Mayor Jerecho Worth. “Minnesota statute [says] if you do a petition, you need your name, your birthday, your current address, and you have to show that you’re a legal resident. That petition didn’t have any of that, and so we couldn’t verify any of the signatures.”

The Walker City Council claims the sale will increase the city’s tax base and bring in more jobs and competition to the area.

“They’re looking to hire 10 to 13 employees,” Worth stated. “Currently, we only staff two to four employees, and their sale pitch was to offer the job to our employees, so there was no, ‘We’re letting people go.’ They could transition and still have a job.”

Anderson is skeptical about how well those jobs will pay. “The question they don’t ask them is, will they pay a living wage? And the answer is ‘no.’ You look at some of their, you know, what they offer and it’s very low.”

Worth also says that Miner’s promised much higher sales as well.

“They’re telling us three to five million dollars annually,” said Worth. “We’re breaking anywhere from $30,000 to $80,000. Sometimes we’ve been to $100,000, but that’s rare.”

He also added that the offer from Miner’s was too high to ignore. “It’s close to like eight to 10 [times] of what it was worth.”

Some residents, however, don’t want a corporation coming into town and are concerned it could take money away that goes back into the community.

“Super One has a monopoly on food and medicine, pretty much,” Anderson said. “They don’t need to take away our money generating options and then also attack the small business on the north and south side of town.”

But Worth isn’t sure what could be done from this point, given that the City Council has already voted “yes” on the sale.

“We can’t rewrite history,” he asserted. “The vote was ‘yes.’ We really can’t put it out to vote. It’s been done, it’s complete. I don’t know the legalities of it, but it just can’t—we can’t rewrite history.”

“The question for them is, do they represent the community or Super One?” asked Anderson. “Because if this many people are against something, it’s just very strange that it’s happening.”

Worth added that many residents have approached the council about municipal dispensaries, and says they are considering replacing the municipal liquor store with a municipal dispensary once the merger with Super One Liquor is complete.