Panel Advances Lower Dui Limit Senate Committee Votes To Lower Blood-Alcohol Threshold To 0.08

Legislation that lowers the legal threshold for drunken driving was overwhelmingly approved Monday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, over the objections of Sen. Clyde Boatright.

In a room packed with members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and police officers, the committee voted 9-2 to send the full Senate the bill reducing the blood-alcohol content from 0.10 to 0.08.

Boatright, R-Rathdrum, was one of two dissenters. He even made up his own handout on the issue, and passed it out to the other committee members.

“It’s just an arbitrary figure,” he said of the .08 standard. “The people that we need to get after are the people that don’t care. Those are the folks that are at .15, .14.”

Boatright said the percentage of fatal accidents involving alcohol is dropping, so there’s no need to change the law.

Sen. Jack Riggs, R-Coeur d’Alene, voted with the majority. A physician, Riggs said he thought .08 was a reasonable standard for impairment.

“.08 is impairment for the vast majority of people,” Riggs said.

Police officers throughout Kootenai County agreed with the proposal.

“A lot of people, by the time they get to .10, are already so out of control they represent a danger to society,” said Lt. Jeff Thomas, of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department.

He said he’s seen drivers below .10 who could scarcely stand, much less drive a car. Lt. Doug Camster of the Idaho State Police agreed.

“There are a lot of people that I’ve contacted that have been .08 or .09 that were way messed up. I mean bad,” he said.

Sgt. Jim Greensides of the Coeur d’Alene Police CARE traffic safety program, said alcohol affects people in vastly different ways. Their weight, experience drinking and food consumption are among the variables that affect how “drunk” they feel.

But for many people, .10 is far more impairing than they may realize, officers said.

Fourteen other states have reduced their legal limits to .08.

Republican Sen. Hal Bunderson of Meridian, who has been pushing the legislation, maintained those states experienced lower fatalities and fewer arrests, which helps ease the burden on the courts and jails.

“The number of persons arrested for DUI has declined precipitously,” he said. “The number of fatalities has declined precipitously. If you want to reduce pressure on the courts, you’ll vote for this. If you want to reduce pressure on the prisons, you’ll vote for this.”

But Ken McClure, the local spokesman for beer-maker Anheuser-Busch, said other factors could account for the drop.

With Idaho already ranking eighth in the nation for fewest alcohol-related highway fatalities, he said the target of tougher drunken driving laws should be the motorists with blood-alcohol contents of 0.14 and higher who are involved in 62 percent of those fatalities. Fewer than 11 percent had blood-alcohol contents of .08 or .09.

“The people who are the problem are already violating existing law,” McClure said. “This is, although well-intentioned, an extremely misguided piece of legislation.”

He said that while drunken driving remains a serious problem, it is one that is easing. Since 1982, the number of alcohol-related fatalities in Idaho has declined 34 percent overall and 56 percent on a per-vehicle basis, he said.

John Adams, chief Kootenai County public defender, also is opposed to the legislation.

“Why don’t they just make it against the law to drink anything and drive?” he said. “I think it’s arbitrary. I don’t know of any legitimate foundation that shows that reducing the legal BAC to .08 would affect anything.”

However, Adams does believe the lower standard would mean more crowding in the local jails and state prison system.

“A lot more people would be arrested,” he said.

He is concerned that people with alcohol levels of .07 and .06 would end up getting arrested and charged with drunken driving because the Breathalyzers could be inaccurate.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Betsy Z. Russell and Winda Benedetti Staff writers The Associated Press contributed to this report.