Wedding barn law already bites into Wisconsin businesses
A law meant to hobble wedding barns in Wisconsin just went into force Jan. 1, but it already was driving away customers long before then.
“It bit into my business last summer,” said Jean Bahn, who owns Farmview Event Barn near Berlin. “This year will be worse.”
Wedding receptions aren’t last-minute affairs, so the last time the grass was green, brides already were picking 2026 weekends, which the new law made much more scarce. “Now I’m turning away so many people, it’s sad,” said Bahn. “This isn’t sitting well with people.”
Which cuts to the heart of it: Wisconsin’s foolish new restriction on wedding venues not only hurts barn owners, it disappoints couples with rustic tastes, and for no good reason.
The law, passed in 2023, decrees that venues rented for private events at which the people holding the party bring their own alcohol can host only six such events a year, and only one a month — unless they prohibit bring-your-own drinks and instead get a liquor license like a tavern. Those are subject to strict quotas. Town boards can simply refuse.
If you get one, the pain is just beginning. Bahn, on the board of the Wisconsin Agricultural Tourism Association, said a friend who runs a wedding barn felt she had no choice but to be licensed. The friend has had to pay $30,000 for required coolers and equipment suitable for a full-time tavern but not for a seasonal business. “It’s ill thought-out for the economy of rural Wisconsin,” said Bahn.
That’s one reason the Badger Institute opposed the idea when it unfortunately passed on a bipartisan basis.
Not all wedding barn proprietors are against the rules. “We have to make it a playing field that’s even,” said Joan Schmidt, whose Springbrook Events offers, amid ponds and trees just east of Beaver Dam, an antique chapel and a barn that can justly be called majestic.
It was just a barn when she and her husband, Bill, bought it. They installed air conditioning. Without it, on a 90-degree July afternoon a hay mow is “a convection oven, that’s all it is,” said Bill. They put in an elevator for wheelchairs. They pay their bartenders, train them, pay workers’ comp.
“We lost some business,” said Joan, when would-be customers realized they’d pay thousands more for drinks served their guests at Springbrook than with a BYOB catering set-up at a barn without a liquor license. Their license means not so much as a can of beer not bought by the Schmidts through a regulated distributor can be brought in.
But the Schmidts, members of the Tavern League of Wisconsin, offer a premium product priced commensurately.
Pricing is key. Bahn noted that a full-service venue nearby in Oshkosh will host a splendid reception for $15,000, but “a lot of people are like me — there’s no way in aitch they’ll pay that much.” She looked into getting licensed. “That was not a model that worked for me. We really are a barn on a farm.”
That’s where the talk about an even playing field falls apart. “We’re not on the same playing field,” Bahn said. Barns like hers aren’t serving alcohol without a license because “we serve nothing. We sell nothing. We rent space.”
In that, such barns are like park pavilions. The new law specifically exempts those and other municipal property. That’s how places such as Milwaukee County can take reservations for DIY open-air receptions in South Shore Park, alcohol certainly allowed. Churches and school buildings can rent space without limit. So can “regularly established athletic fields and stadiums,” so if love throws together a Cubs-loving bride and a Brewers-fan groom, their families can party legally with a tailgate reception.
A lawsuit having been stymied, there’s a bill in the works to fix this: State senators Mark Spreitzer, the Beloit Democrat, and André Jacques, the New Franken Republican, propose raising the limit to 36 events a year rather than six. Between the bill and an Assembly version, Spreitzer and Jacques have 13 bipartisan cosponsors, the latest added this week.
Thirty-six weekends certainly fills out the decent-weather calendar, but it raises a question: Why 36? Why a limit at all?
“That’s a good question,” said Bahn, adding that the ag tourism association figured it a workable number. A spokeswoman for Spreitzer called it a “good-faith effort to compromise,” gamely adding the senator’s hope that the legislative majority that passed the restrictions “will consider this legislation in the spirit it was offered.”
Which is more generous than is deserved by the sour spirit driving a six-event restriction. Anyone could see when it passed and can see now that the new law amounts to one segment of the venue industry, a segment built on a high-gloss, high-cost model, trying to snuff out a lower-cost alternative.
If willing customers and willing barn-keepers come to terms on space for a homemade wedding, who is the state to barge in and say that couples aren’t spending enough money to be happy?
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.
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