City accepts underage drinking grant

The grant aims to keep high school students from drinking.

By James Patrick Schmidt

Published March 20, 2007

Drinking underage might become more risky as a result of a grant accepted by the Columbia City Council during its meeting Monday night.

The grant is from the Missouri Department of Public Safety, which often gives small grants to the Columbia Police Department, according to Columbia police Chief Randy Boehm.

"This grant provides overtime money for us to do special enforcement events where we will bring officers on in addition to the regular officers on duty," Boehm said.

The additional officers would work on a saturation project focusing on enforcing underage drinking laws in specific areas around the city.

According to a news release from Gov. Matt Blunt's office, examples of events that the overtime officers might participate in include retail compliance checks, party patrols, youth oriented driving-while-intoxicated checkpoints and other enforcement or educational tasks.

"The number of Missouri youth who use and abuse alcohol is alarming," Blunt stated in the release. "These federal funds will help control and limit the number of young people from purchasing and abusing alcohol."

Boehm said the department might work with state liquor control officers but probably not the MU Police Department. State liquor control officers are involved in ensuring that local businesses are asking customers for identification before supplying them with alcohol.

The federal Enforcing the Underage Drinking Laws program provides the grant to the Department of Public Safety, according to the release.

Missouri was awarded more than $220,000, and Columbia received $4,735.62.

"This is a grant that was available that we applied for, and we were given this money to help us in reference to underage drinking," Boehm said.

Columbia police Sgt. John White, who proposed the issue to the council on March 5, said at that time, this grant is not targeted at college students in Columbia.

"I'm not so much concerned for the college students because they are going to do what they want when in privacy, but it's the high school students we worry about," White said in a previous Maneater report. "We want to be able to get them early and make sure they don't begin to drink."

Mayor Darwin Hindman said he feels this is a good step for the city.

"We as a council feel that underage drinking is a problem," he said. "We're happy to get grants that help us enforce it."