New Dui Laws Take Effect Tuesday Changes In Welfare, Initiative Laws Also Starting

Scores of new state laws, including those regulating welfare, take effect on Tuesday.

Most people won’t notice some of the changes. For example, the lieutenant governor now can perform marriages.

Others will surface only if you get into trouble. On Tuesday, the blood-alcohol threshold for drunken driving and boating drops from 0.10 percent to 0.08.

Welfare becomes temporary assistance on Tuesday. Instead of handouts, work and self-reliance will be the hallmarks of the new system.

Elsewhere on the new-law front, initiatives, a fiercely guarded Idaho tradition since 1912, become harder to carry out after Tuesday.

In retaliation for three initiatives that cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat in 1996, business interests and the Idaho Farm Bureau convinced lawmakers to make the ballot qualifying process more difficult.

Instead of just gathering registered voter signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the last race for governor, initiative advocates now have to get the signatures of 6 percent of the registered voters in half of Idaho’s 44 counties.

Initiative advocates led by the Idaho Family Forum are out not only to repeal the retaliatory changes, but make it even easier to win ballot status.

They have launched an initiative under the old 10 percent law that not only repeals the requirement for signatures from at least 22 counties, but lowers the basic signature total from 10 percent to 6 percent. Ten percent is 41,335. Six percent is under 25,000.

The crackdown on drunken driving and boating also continues. Besides lowering the blood-alcohol level to 0.08 percent for general motorists and boaters, the drunken driving limit drops even lower for commercial drivers. And those under 21 get zero tolerance - the presumption of intoxication at just 0.02 percent for boaters.

Lawmakers lowered it to 0.02 on the road three years ago.

Advocates rejected warnings that the changes would lead to more convictions and increased pressure on already overcrowded jails and prisons.

“But in looking at the statistics in states that did it, there was the opposite effect,” Deputy Attorney General William von Tagen said.

“The track record in other states is that it reduces the number of drunk drivers.”

At the 0.08 level, Von Tagen said, people seem to still have enough judgment not to get behind the wheel.

Idaho businesses are getting clearer guidelines on employee drug and alcohol testing that managers are using to cope with safety and cost issues.

Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry President Steve Ahrens, whose organization pressed for the bill, said the guidelines will let employers “legally and fairly conduct drug and alcohol tests in a way that is fair to employees and enhances workplace safety.”

New adult-child ratios for day care go on the books, and backers of the compromise - already criticized as ineffective - are scrambling to make sure more stringent standards don’t apply to the medium-size day care operators they apparently inadvertently failed to legally protect.

The new law requires one adult for each six children 18 months or younger; one adult for each 12 children between 18 months and 5 years and one adult for 18 children 5 and older.