Williamsburg voters turn down alcohol sales

Nearly 1,400 Williamsburg voters went to the polls Tuesday with the majority deciding that the city isn’t ready for the legalized sale of alcohol at restaurants.
Out of the nearly 3,600 registered voters in six Williamsburg precincts, 42 percent voted for the sale of alcohol, and 58 percent voted against it.
Pat Marple, Chairperson of the Citizens Against the Sale of Alcohol, said he was pleased with the outcome, and that the election went pretty much as he thought it would.
“I was hoping for a larger margin of victory, but we have a victory, and I am very satisfied,” Marple said.
Marple said he thinks the people of Williamsburg coming together as a group is what swayed the outcome in the favor of the anti-alcohol forces.
“We came together as a group, as a unit,” Marple said. “We are church going people. We are God fearing people. We prayed, and we believed, and we had faith. We gave it over to God, and God led this and directed us.
“A fine group of people – men and women, people from different denominations, different churches, different races – we came together as one person.”
Williamsburg Mayor Roddy Harrison said he wasn’t surprised by the margin.
“I thought it was going to be as close as it was. I knew it was going to be close. That is the way the majority of the people felt, and we will go from there.”
Danny Davenport, who helped organize the petition drive, said that while he doesn’t live in Williamsburg, he still wants to do what’s best for Williamsburg, which he feels was the alcohol initiative.
Davenport admits he was surprised by the vote.
“If they want to live in Mayberry they can, but I’m not going to,” Davenport said. “Mayberry was good for Andy Griffith, but I don’t want to live there.”
He said there is a group here in town that he feels will organize another petition drive the next time one can be placed on the ballot.
“It will eventually pass when the old timers fade away,” Davenport said.
Davenport admits that he feels there are a lot of hypocrites in Williamsburg including some major former drinkers, who had “No” signs posted in their yards, and a lot of people that go to Corbin and London every weekend to drink, who voted against the measure.
Pro-alcohol forces filed the ballot initiative on March 17 with 608 certified signatures from Williamsburg residents asking for the question to be placed on the ballot about whether to allow the sale of alcohol at restaurants that seat at least 100 people, and derive 70 percent of their sales from food.
Tuesday’s vote went much differently than the last wet/dry election held in Williamsburg in September 1976.
The 1976 election said the dry forces trump the wet forces by a vote of 1,315 to 180.
The ballot question Williamsburg voters were faced with Tuesday was identical to one passed in Corbin on May 20, 2003.
Corbin voters approved the initiative with 1,152 people voting for it as opposed to 941 people voting against it.
The measure won approval in seven of the eight Corbin voting precincts.
An effort to repeal the sale of alcohol in Corbin died after organizers weren’t able to come up with enough signatures to get the measure placed back on the ballot for this election.