Rep. Luke Malek’s liquor license reform bill has been held at the desk in the House by Speaker Scott Bedke. “I’m working as hard as I can to get it moving,” Malek said this morning. He said there’s some question about to which committee the bill will be assigned.

Bedke said the proposal’s not dead. “That’s a big issue, and there’s a lot of stakeholders involved, and we have not got an engaged Senate on this issue,” he said this morning. “So I want to give everybody a day or two to catch up.”

The speaker said, “I don‘t think the issue is dead at all. It’s an issue we have not addressed, and every year we continue without addressing it, the problem certainly isn’t getting fixed, and some would say it’s getting bigger.”

Malek’s bill, HB 255, would reform a 70-year-old quota system that allots a single liquor-by-the-drink license for every 1,500 residents in Idaho cities; once issued, the licenses can be bought, sold or leased, driving prices for them sky-high. Malek is proposing a new two-tiered system in which cities or counties could choose to grant non-transferable liquor licenses to restaurants that have full kitchens and a state beer and wine license. Those new licenses would carry much higher fees than current liquor licenses, and would come with more restrictions, including stepped-up requirements for training servers.

Meanwhile, the current state liquor licenses for bars would continue, and those who own them would get various discounts and benefits designed to act as a “buy-back” over time for what they invested into their licenses under the current system that’s driven their value up so high. That would be underwritten by the fees on the new licenses.