High court shoots down bowling alley lawsuit

WASILLA — A long-defunct bar attached to the Valley’s only bowling alley, shuttered for a time and re-opened under new management, lives on in the justice system.

Or at least it did until this past week, when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Fish Heads Bar and Grill in a ruling released Friday.

Fish Heads Bar and Grill lost its liquor license in 2005 and its owner, Bob Stevens, began the process of divesting himself from it soon after. The bowling alley has remained open most of that time, but has changed hands. The bar has also since re-opened under a different name.

Stevens lost his license at the end of a long and public fight with the Mat-Su Borough, which claimed Stevens was violating noise ordinances and held an un-permitted strip show. The borough brought its case to the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, asking that the license be revoked.

In 2006, Stevens filed a lawsuit against the borough and the control board. Stevens said many things publicly about the borough and its noise ordinance and adult cabaret statute at the time, none of them positive. The gist of his court case was that the borough employee who protested his license didn’t explicitly have the power to do so, that state liquor laws are hopelessly self-contradictory and that Stevens’ constitutional rights were violated with the revocation of his license.

Starting with that first accusation — the borough allowed its director of planning to protest Stevens’ license — Alaska Supreme Court Justice Daniel Winfree says the borough had the right to do that, and even if the borough hadn’t explicitly authorized the director to protest liquor licenses, it didn’t have to.

“We note several other state courts have concluded that a municipality may cure the absence of a delegation of authority by ratifying an agent’s act so long as the municipality held the power to perform the original act,” Winfree wrote.

And, anyway, the judge argued, it wasn’t just the planning director involved in the process; borough attorneys and other staff participated “at every procedural level.”

As for the second accusation, Winfree dismisses Stevens’ claim pretty thoroughly in a one-sentence summation of a couple pages of argument dealing with sections of Alaska code governing liquor licenses.

“Sections .370 and .480 do not contradict one another — they apply in different circumstances,” the judge writes.

And, finally, with regard to the due process claim. Essentially, Stevens said that it wasn’t up to him to prove that he hadn’t violated the noise ordinances, but was instead up to the borough to prove he had. It’s a pretty standard idea in criminal law that prosecutors have to prove a defendant guilty, rather than forcing a defendant to prove he is innocent. The phrase “due process” is usually used to describe this.

But the license revocation was a civil case, using a different set of rules. And “due process” means something different in that context.

Prior state Supreme Court rulings require only that the licensee be given an “opportunity to be heard in a meaningful, impartial hearing,” Winfree wrote. Stevens also has to be given notice that the hearing is happening. It doesn’t have to be a big, formal hearing, just a fair and impartial one, Winfree wrote.

“Nothing about requiring Stevens, rather than the borough, to carry the burden of persuasion would deprive Stevens of notice, an opportunity to be heard or the impartiality or significance of his hearing,” according to the ruling.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.