Bill Description: Senate Bill 1231 would create a special liquor license for catering businesses that cater at least 50 events per year.
Rating: -1
NOTE: Senate Bill 1231 is related to Senate Bill 1134 (2025), but with some noted changes.
Does it violate the principle of equal protection under the law? Examples include laws that discriminate or differentiate based on age, gender, or religion or which apply laws, regulations, rules, or penalties differently based on such characteristics. Conversely, does it restore or protect the principle of equal protection under the law?
Idaho’s patchwork of liquor licensing laws creates a significant impediment to market entry and unnecessarily limits access to both providers and consumers. The current quota-based licensing system should be replaced with a simple, straightforward, and unlimited licensing system that is low-cost, free of population-based and geographical restrictions, and open to all applicants.
Rather than fix this broken system that creates artificial and economically harmful scarcity, the Legislature has passed numerous carve-outs, exempting various types of businesses. The businesses are not called out by name in Idaho statute, but they are described in enough detail to limit the carve-out to a small number of businesses, or sometimes even just one.
Senate Bill 1231 would create Section 23-903d, Idaho Code, to carve out another exception, this time for a single-event “caterer liquor license” that is only available to an “established caterer,” which the bill defines as “a catering business whose business address is located at a publicly accessible premises and that caters no fewer than fifty (50) events per year.”
This is a change from Senate Bill 1134 (2025), which defined an “established caterer” as “a catering business that has been in operation for no less than five (5) years and has catered and will continue to cater no fewer than twenty-five (25) events per year.”
Removing the requirement for 5 years of operation is positive because such a requirement provides a significant market advantage for older businesses over new businesses. But doubling the number of events per year and requiring a physical storefront have a similar effect of providing an unfair advantage to larger caterers at the expense of their smaller competitors.
This license would “not count toward the limitation on the number of licenses issued according to population.” The license also “may not be sold or leased and shall not be transferable to any other caterer.”
The fee for a caterer liquor license would be $400 for “each license issued to the owner, operator, or lessee of an established caterer.”
This is a different fee structure than the one proposed in Senate Bill 1134 (2025), which was a $150 annual fee plus $50 for a one-time license for each event.
It is appropriate to allow catering businesses to serve liquor regardless of local population-based liquor license caps, but it is unjust to create a licensing carve-out for large caterers that smaller caterers can’t access. (And it sets up a catch-22 for these smaller businesses that have to meet volume requirements before they are able to offer the same range of services as their competitors.)
(-1)
