A brewing battle over alcohol at the Harris Teeter grocery store still under construction in Adams Morgan appears to be coming to a head well before the long awaited store opens.
The D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustments will be asked next week to decide whether the District’s former zoning administrator wrongly authorized Harris Teeter to sell beer and wine out of its location at 17th Street and Kalorama Road NW, which is slated to open in spring 2008 — three years after it was first announced.
“They’re going to tap dance around it and say grocery stores just automatically get to sell beer and wine,” said Peter Lyden with the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association, which cites a feared traffic and parking nightmare in opposing the 38,000-square-foot market. “No you don’t in this case.”
Currently under construction in the old Citadel building, the grocery store is within the Reed-Cooke overlay — a district subject to special zoning restrictions. Within the overlay, the neighborhood association contends, all alcohol sales for off-premises consumption are explicitly prohibited.
But in a March 21 letter to Harris Teeter’s local attorneys, former Zoning Administrator Bill Crews said the overlay does not preclude sales of beer and wine. They are “accessory” and “incidental” products in the grand scheme of a supermarket’s gross receipts, Crews wrote, and can therefore be sold.
Reed-Cooke is asking the BZA to void that letter, and with it Harris Teeter’s authority to market alcohol.
Jennifer Panetta, Harris Teeter spokeswoman, said the supermarket chain “wants to make sure [the store] is developed correctly, that the neighborhood is happy with what we’re doing.” But alcohol sales, she acknowledged, “are very important to us.”
“We want to be a full service retailer, and the offerings of our beer and wine selection is quite immense,” Panetta said.
For Wilson Reynolds, an Adams Morgan advisory neighborhood commissioner, the overlay argument trumps all others. The rule is clear-cut, he said: No alcoholic beverage sales.
Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham, however, said the market must be allowed to compete.
