OC Chamber Survey on Sunday Alcohol Sales

Should Sunday alcohol sales be extended from just the City of Seneca to all of Oconee County?  That is one question on a survey being conducted by the Oconee County Chamber of Commerce, explains executive director Jillian Lusk. “Back a couple of months ago, several business owners approached me to say that they were very concerned with their sales and mostly because the City of Seneca has the ordinance to do Sunday alcohol sales, well the rest of the county doesn’t and there are several businesses that fall right outside the lines, literally a street over and they have noticed drastic decreases in their revenue on Sundays.  Therefore, those individuals got together and they asked if the Chamber would be willing to have a conversation about doing a referendum at the county level.  Our response, both the Board and myself, was to get them together and form a task force.  They have been meeting for the last couple of months to just talk about if this is the right time, is this the right idea and do people in the county feel this is a good idea.” The Oconee County Chamber wants more feedback from the community on the issue of Sunday alcohol sales, adds Lusk. “We want to encourage more people to join into that conversation.  Right now, we have a survey up on the Chamber’s website to talk about what people’s feeling are on that, we want to be representative of the membership, making sure that we are hearing everybody.  We put out a survey last week and we have had overwhelmingly positive responses to moving forward with that; so, we want feedback, we want input, we can’t know where to go unless our members are directing us in the right direction, but we are so excited about this policy committee, specifically, because we really feel like it is going to address a need in our community to work on issues that businesses on their own sometimes can’t handle.”   Oconee County residents are invited to take the survey by visiting the Chamber’s website at www.oconeechambersc.com or http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e8p9u9d1hpfk7o1k/start.