Login | June 09, 2026
Legislation would require instructions, skills course for liquor permit holders
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: June 3, 2024
A Portage County lawmaker has proposed a bill designed to protect both restaurant and bar patrons and the bartenders and waitstaff who serve them alcoholic beverages.
Rep. Gail Pavliga of Randolph Township devised the bill in response to what she characterized as the needless drunk-driving death of 25-year-old Hayden Kaiser, a junior varsity soccer coach at Solon High School, in 2021.
“Hayden spent hours at the bar (the day of his death) and even racked up a $170 bar tab,” the Republican lawmaker said during a recent Civil Justice Committee hearing in the Ohio House of Representatives. “Yet somehow, he made his way to his car and proceeded to drive home. Again, the bar served Hayden $170 worth of alcohol, then handed him his check and they let him exit the bar and enter his vehicle, without providing any sort of assistance.”
She said Kaiser died in a car crash after leaving the bar. A published account reported that the man’s car crashed into pole alongside Monticello Boulevard in Richmond Heights during the early morning hours June 4.
Pavliga said Kaiser’s blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit at the time of his death.
House Bill 504 calls on the superintendent of Ohio’s Division of Liquor Control to create and administer a training program that includes certain instructions and a skills course for alcohol permit holders and their employees.
According to analysis by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, the required training must include the following:
• Instruction on the statutes and rules that govern the sale of beer, wine, mixed beverages and intoxicating liquor in Ohio;
• Instruction on preventing the illegal service of beer, wine, mixed beverages and intoxicating liquor to persons under 21;
• Instruction on recognizing when to decrease and stop serving beer, wine, mixed beverages, or intoxicating liquor to a person due to the risk of intoxication; and
• Use of conflict management skills in alcohol-related situations.
“By leaving the specifics of the training program to the superintendent, it ensures that the experts in this area are allowed to administer their knowledge and expertise to the people actually serving the beverages,” Pavliga said.
The superintendent must establish the number of hours required to complete the training and a method for determining if a liquor permit holder or an employee of a liquor permit holder successfully completed the training, analysis continued.
Pavliga said the remaining provisons of HB 504, which is to be called Hayden’s Law, protect businesses from being civilly liable from related situations.
“So long as the employees and owner of an establishment have followed the teachings of the training program laid out by the superintendent of liquor control, they cannot be liable,” she said. “We believe that by coupling the requirement of the training program and protections for businesses from lawsuits, this legislation is in the best interest for all parties: obviously the customers, but also the businesses and the superintendent of liquor control.”
Conceding that an individual must be responsible for his own actions, she said she acknowledges that events such as this are not solely the responsibility of the bar.
“We all know that alcohol in too much quantity is dangerous,” she said. “That is no secret and the actions of an individual are not the businesses’ fault. However, bartenders, servers and owners should know more about ways to prevent and handle these very delicate situations, and hopefully this program will save lives.”
Current law generally provides immunity to a liquor permit holder and the permit holder’s employees for the actions of an intoxicated person who causes personal injury, death or property damage, research analyst Jeff Grim wrote in the commission’s analysis.
“However, the permit holder and their employees are liable if the personal injury, death or property damage occurred on the permit holder’s premises or in a parking lot under the control of the permit holder and was proximately caused by the negligence of the permit holder or the permit holder’s employee,” Grim added.
In instances in which injury, death or property damage occurs off premises, the permit holder or employee is liable if alcohol was sold to a noticeably intoxicated person or to an underage person and the individual’s intoxication proximately caused the death, injury or property damage.
Reps. Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, and Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, co-sponsor HB 504, which awaits further consideration by the committee.
Copyright © 2024 The Daily Reporter - All Rights Reserved