Licensing Headaches

The guys from K&D Glass came in yesterday and replaced all the hardware on the side Fire Exit door, so it has an emergency "panic bar" opener which is standard in fire exits. Also, Scott Refrigeration came in and got our walk-in cooler up and running in the new location.

I spent quite a bit of time on Wednesday afternoon trying to sort out forms and applications. We're in the process of getting Fire Marshall approval, so I needed to get some forms together for him (sprinkler inspection report, floor plan, etc.). I'm also trying to get the food and alcohol licenses transferred over. The food license probably won't be too difficult - the food (Board of Health) inspector was already in, a few weeks ago, and we reviewed all of the steps that needed to be taken to get the new premises up to provincial requirements.

The liquor license is going to be more of a problem. I was under the impression that it would simply be transferred to the new location, by submitting a new floor plan and having the inspector come do a walk-through once the Fire Marshall submitted an approval report. Well, that does have to happen, but so do a whole lot of other things. Essentially, they have to cancel my old license and I have to apply for another one, brand new, from scratch. The only thing that is even remotely helpful is that they already have my "personal history" report on file, but I need to submit all kinds of other things over again, even though the corporation is unchanged, and the menus are unchanged. The drawback is that the process of getting a new license may take as long as three weeks at the best of times, and with the holidays, it could be even worse. Hopefully though, I'll have everything together and on the desk of the right person in Fredericton by Friday or Monday, and she'll be able to process it fairly quickly. It would be quite sad if we couldn't serve alcohol on our grand reopening night. This may delay our re-opening until the middle of January, unfortunately.