2017-09-21 Liquor Adjudication Board Minutes

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Takase: We bill them on November 15, for the entire year and even then, we are willing to work with the Licensees on a payment plan. We can spread it out over two or three payments. For a lot of restaurants and dispensers, the holidays is where they make a lot of their money. We will defer our payments until after that. This is what we did, but they never followed through after that. Mr. Bal is aware of it. We have talked and he has assured us that he will be on top of it this time around. They have been running as a "headless" organization for a while and I think that contributed to their problems. Fuke: Thank you. Lindsey: Are there any other questions? Smith: I have a question. When I was looking at this timeline, it seemed like the Department made continual efforts to communicate with your organization for payments due. Did you folks respond to these or was there silence? Bal: I believe there was a response. A couple responses were through phone calls and me coming down to the office. I had a conversation with Gerald. 1 think and I'm not exactly sure, in the Complaint itself if were supposed to get back to you folks in writing. I'm sure we did not do that. This sort of thing was supposed to be for ownership. The information was sent off to him and I can almost guarantee it did not happen. Takase: I think most of it precedes his coming back to the company. We gave them many opportunities to pay. We didn't have many direct conversations with the owner but we did send notices to them. The messages we got back from them was, "ok, I'II be in on Friday", and he never showed. That's our correspondence with the owner in the past. They made partial payment but told me they couldn't pay it all right now. I had given them until the end of July to make the final payment and sure enough they didn't pay. 1 thought we had done more than our share to be reasonable and that's why these charges came up. Smith: The Board needs to support the staff and the investigators. If there are deadlines that are given to you that are not met, there needs to be a paper trail response to see that you are trying. I couldn't see if you folks were making an effort and based on your comments, you said they probably did not. From the Boards perspective, we don't know if you're trying to communicate with us. At some point it will come to terminating the license and that may be something you want to convey to your owner. This is serious and the consequences are, you may not be in business. Hopefully bringing you on board brings structure and organization. The Board has different alternatives and at some point, it comes to termination. You don't want to get to that point. We want you to be successful, but you have to work with us and follow the rules. SEPTEMBER 21, 2017- LIQUOR ADJUDICATION BOARD MINUTES 6