McClouth ? After three months of handing out yard signs, posting banners, making mass mailings and even taking a case to court, Charles Karmann will find out Tuesday if he can keep his liquor store open.

Along with helping to decide who the next governor and attorney general will be, McLouth voters will determine whether the town will allow retail alcoholic liquor sales.

“The town, as a whole, has just had incredible support for it,” Karmann said about his store, which he opened Aug. 1. “A lot of people feel like it’s time that McLouth catch up with everybody else and keep tax money here.”

Karmann’s major concern is that the ballot question’s wording will be confusing to many voters.

“Honestly, if it was really simple wording, I wouldn’t be afraid for it to go to vote at all,” he said.

The question on the ballot reads: “No retailer’s license shall be issued for premises within the city of McLouth, Kansas, for the sale of retail alcoholic liquor in the original package.”

Basically, a vote “no” means Karmann keeps his store. A vote “yes” means he closes it.

Last month Karmann and his attorney went before Jefferson County District Court Judge Gary Nafziger and argued that the petition wasn’t worded the way the state said it had to be. Nafziger ruled that the wording was fine.

“It’s very confusing for people to read it, but the judge that we got said that he thought people could read it and understand it enough that he let it go,” Karmann said.

But Dee Hornback, who helped circulate the petition to get the issue on the ballot, disagreed with Karmann. She said there is nothing confusing about it.

“All they have to do is read it,” Hornback said. “To me, it says exactly what it says.”

For at least 70 or more years McLouth has been a dry town. While city ordinances didn’t specifically prohibit liquor stores, they made it virtually impossible for one to open. The stores couldn’t be within 1,000 feet of a church, school, post office and a few other establishments, Karmann said.

“This town isn’t very big,” he said.

But a year ago, a new state law went into effect that amended the state’s liquor control act. Liquor stores became legal in all Kansas cities as long as they were at least 200 feet from schools and churches.

Cities could pass their own, more restrictive ordinances, but McLouth did not, and that allowed Karmann, who worked for several years with Standard Beverage Corp. in Lawrence, to open his own store.

Hornback and others like her think the people of McLouth should have a say on the matter and launched a petition drive to get the liquor question on the ballot.

“I thought people should have the right to vote,” she said, adding that she doesn’t favor retail liquor sales in town. Having one in McLouth just makes it easier for someone of legal age to buy liquor and pass it on to underage youths, she said, and “then they go out and get killed” on highways.

“Alcohol brings nothing but trouble,” she said.

Ironically, while liquor stores in most towns will have to close while polls are open Tuesday, Karmann said he can stay open because McLouth never has been a legally dry town.

But he will not be handing out fliers from his store. It’s too close to a polling place – the town’s fire station – to allow campaigning on Election Day.