A message to Harvest Homecoming food vendors about temporary food (and beer) service fees.

Harvest Homecoming food vendors, please take note.

You'll soon be paying the usual tax of $20 per day to legally sell food during New Albany's annual fest.

You should know that in 2013, the Floyd County Health Department gave its regulatory wheel a mighty heave and decided that beer qualifies as food, but when NABC took them to the mat, they Dr. Tom Harris mustered a feeble compromise in an effort to keep us quiet. Now they say beer is food, and beer pourers must get a temporary food serving permit -- but we beer pourers don't have to pay the $20 fee.

The rest of you?

You still do.

That's really dumb, isn't it?

If beer is food, isn't food also beer?

If so, exactly why are YOU still being compelled to pay for these temporary food permits when beer pourers are not required to fund the department's rampantly intrusive slush?

Really, shouldn't you ask the health department flunkies this very question when you go to the Taj Mahal of Health Fascism on Bono Road to pay for a permit, one that according to Dr. Tom at our hearing in July, 2013, isn't "about the money" at all?

If it isn't about the money, then why should any of us pay?

And, for anyone else contemplating a temporary beer event: If the fine for not having a temporary food serving permit is half the cost of the permit, and it there is no charge for the permit, then what's the fine? Think carefully, because after all, careful thinking puts you five steps ahead of the Floyd County Health Department.

Meanwhile, as I've indicated on several occasions, NABC is perfectly content to fight the ongoing Cold War with the health department, and do so for the foreseeable future. In late 2013, the Attorney General of the state of Indiana actually did agree with NABC on the matter of the health department's ineptitude in improperly usurping the Alcohol & Tobacco Commission's regulatory turf. The complete text can be viewed here, but since the local health department refuses to acknowledge the decision, we're still in the trenches

Kindly note that the other side of the coin -- the health department's juvenile on-line defamation, picture above -- still remains very much in play ... in 2014, as in 2013. It isn't going away any time soon, which is just fine with us ... because neither are we.

Too bad we had to close the restaurant.

Hmm, you don't think the health department's defamation had anything to do with it, do you?