A rural Park County business looking to add retail liquor won’t have much trouble getting one at the moment, as the commissioners approved 21 retail liquor licenses Tuesday. 

That leaves six available — only two were available previously — as the county has been granted two extra licenses, for a total of 27, due to growth in the county outside of city limits. 

The state grants a number of licenses per number of rural county residents. 

The county had 23 liquor licenses approved in the past year but two businesses are not renewing this year, including Wapiti Valley Meats and Community Mountain LLC, the business that ran Sleeping Giant until selling earlier this year. 

Park County First Deputy Clerk Hans Odde said he has been in talks with the new owners of Sleeping Giant and said with all of the licenses available, there’s no rush to get one. HMH Capital of Dallas is slated to open summer operations in 2028?

Businesses can also acquire 24 hour permits for special events if they don’t possess a full permit. 

The commissioners also approved three malt beverage permits, which only allow beer and wine sales and not hard liquor. 

This situation is a bit different from this time last year, when Odde said there was only one license available. 

“We'd always had a number of licenses left, two, three, four, five,” Odde said at the time, adding, “I never anticipated that we would get down to one remaining. It might be a thing the commissioners want to consider at some point, having some sort of a policy decision or figure out how you're going to say, we have one left, and all of a sudden, two applicants come in, and how do you decide?”

With more licenses available and less in use, it’ll likely be a little while before that issue comes up again.