Right now, there's almost nowhere in Mooringsport to spend your money.
There's no gas station. There's no restaurant. There isn't a bar or a tourist attraction, a grocery store or a shopping mall. Even to get your bare essentials, the kind you could get from Walmart or a dollar store, you need to drive outside of town and fetch them.
"You can't buy a cold drink in Mooringsport," said Mayor William Moore.
Now there's hope that alcohol might save the day because last month about 70-80 people there voted to allow beer and liquor sales inside city limits again after many dry years. But Mooringsport suffers some of the other problems affecting small northwest Louisiana towns — like an aging population of residents whose children are choosing to live elsewhere or a shrinking tax base that prohibits much in the way of public investment — and it will likely be a long time before it's clear if alcohol sales are solving them.
"It's not for today and tomorrow. It's for the future. It will take time. It took time to lose all the businesses. It will take time to grow them back," Moore said.
Voters in Mooringsport approved five propositions during the Nov. 18 election which allowed for the sale of beverages with alcohol content between 0.5 - 6%, as well as for their consumption at permitted restaurants and bars. The five propositions got between 107-111 total votes and were approved by margins between 65-69%. Like all elections this year statewide, turnout for the propositions was incredibly low — only between 25-27% of registered voters cast ballots, according to data from the Louisiana Secretary of State.
The votes revoked a ban on local alcohol sales at least 15 years old, though some in the village raised opposition to the efforts. But the man who led the charge to have the laws reversed also will be one of the first to take advantage of his success.
"There were a handful of people that were very opposed, and they were very vocal in their opposition. But that was a handful of people. Our immediate, overwhelming response — person after person after person — was they are so hungry for any type of economic activity. With no businesses, there is no tax revenue coming in. The little village is exclusively operating off of a combination of taxes and fees associated with selling utilities and grant money, and that's it," Wayne Boyter said.
Wayne Boyter expects to open Cooter Brown's Vault, a beer cave being installed in an old bank building on Croom Street, by early next year. The entrepreneur's primary business is as a general contractor working around the region, but he said his family's generations of history in Mooringsport made him want to invest in the village. Along with the beer cave, Boyter already operates a water and ice kiosk as one of the village's few active businesses and is working to build a small resort near the banks of Caddo Lake.
The old bank that will become Cooter Brown's Vault still looks like a bank inside and out with a few exceptions, such as the bulldog footprints Boyter allowed to become permanent fixtures of the new floor and the mural on its exterior wall festooned with Bonnie-and-Clyde-style imagery. When the building's renovations are complete and the business is ready to open next year, Boyter plans for the beer cave itself to have the appearance of an opened bank vault with all the previously-illegal alcohol now for sale available inside.
"It's about 120 years old, and it was just interesting looking. Something Bonnie and Clyde would pull up in front of and rob," Boyter said. "It was literally caving in on itself. I had to pour about $320-340,000 of investment into it just to save this old building."
Overturning the ban on alcohol sales, he said, could be an important step in reviving local business both for himself and others. He hopes gas stations, restaurants and other businesses might be more willing to take a look at Mooringsport now.
"After basically a generation of nothing, a lot of people are ready to see that kind of positive change take root," Boyter said.
After nearly 50 years of living in Mooringsport, the village mayor says he'll support just about anything that brings in some economic activity. He didn't blame the alcohol ban entirely for the slow drain of business out of the town, but he said it played a critical role.
"You hear different reasons, but to me, I would think the people who have the different camps around Caddo Lake and come out on the weekends, sometimes they stay a week and sometimes they just stay two days, they used to get acquainted with the different store owners and they would stop there to buy their supplies. And when they couldn't buy their beer anymore, rather than just make two stops they just bought everything at one stop in Shreveport," Moore said. "Alcohol sales were a reason they declined to an extent."
Moore said he believes there were good intentions behind prohibition in Mooringsport, but he doesn't think the ban on alcohol sales served at all to reduce drinking or alcoholism in his village. Residents just drove outside of town to get their beer.
"Not one ounce of beer was not drunk because of us voting it out. They just drove eight miles down the road and paid a dime more a can for it," Moore said. "All we wound up with was the empty cans."
Though Mooringsport was singular in its alcohol prohibition, many other towns in Caddo are dealing with similar troubles: older populations, young people leaving the places where they were born and a disinterest from businesses and entrepreneurs.
Caddo Parish Administrator Erica Bryant said the parish government doesn't take a position on the value of alcohol sales themselves, but said anything that can bring some commerce back to small towns is welcome.
"Mooringsport faces challenges just like any other small town: a lack of economic development and people are leaving for more opportunity," Bryant said. "It's not just about being able to consume alcohol, it's about having economic opportunities in town."
Boyter said he believes Mooringsport can reverse some of those trends, but it will take time and significantly more investment than just a few places selling beer.
"I don't see there being 'a' good solution. I don't see there being 'a' good answer. I see there being 50 good solutions and 50 good answers all simultaneously taking place," Boyter said. "There's many different things that need to take place and can take place. Alcohol sales, in my opinion, are just one play out of many that's going to lead to greater economic improvement."
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