It's currently illegal to consume your own alcohol on Vancouver beaches, and a promise made by the park board in the fall to study legal alternatives appears to have stalled.

"This has been going on for some years," Vancouver Park Board chair Stuart MacKinnon said back in October. "People have been asking to be able to have an alcoholic beverage at the beach or at the park."

According to the original plan, beer and wine would be served at the English Bay and Kitsilano beach concession stands beginning in May, and the board would spend two years assessing whether to expand to other locations.

And you wouldn't be able to bring your beverage wherever you wanted. Instead, drinkers would be restricted to a roped-off area similar to a beer garden.

Since then, some businesses have even made signs and menus advertising alcoholic beverages, but two months after the original launch date, the stands are still closed.

But that doesn't appear to be stopping some Vancouverites for enjoying a few drinks by the water.

Police ticketed drinkers on the beach 247 times in 2017.

Despite that, Vancouver resident Donna Hoffman said that at English Bay, the drinks are still flowing on any given day.

"I don't ever see any problems," Hoffman told CTV News, expressing concern about the amount of time applications for licences are taking to be processed.

"It's been in the works for months now," she said. "It's just somebody dragging their feet."

For others, like Keith Murdoch, the issue is about making things fair for all beach-goers.

"People are smoking joints pretty much everywhere," he said. "I think that folks who don't smoke pot or cigarettes or whatever—I don't think they should be discriminated against."

The province said alcohol permits are a complicated issue.

"There is no typical length of time for an application to be processed," the government said in a statement.

The park board had little to say about the delay, telling CTV News to contact the affected vendors instead.

Staff at Cactus Club told CTV all they can do is wait for approval, adding that they hope it will come before summer ends.

With files from CTV Vancouver's Emad Agahi