DWI
State: Enough public awareness in Gallup

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — For the past three years, Rose Lopez has gone where few others in Gallup have gone before — into the trenches where alcoholics live and play.

But on Oct. 1, her mission will end since the New Mexico Department of Transportation has announced that it will no longer fund her program.

She is one of a handful of outreach coordinators throughout the state who were assigned the task of putting out the word that law enforcement agencies were stepping up their efforts to catch drunken drivers.

Now, she said, the state has told her and the others “that there is enough public awareness and no longer requires our services.”

She was working for the DWI Resource Center, a non-profit organization headquartered in Albuquerque that has been in the state for the past 15 years collecting data on drunken drivers and helping to think of ways to reduce the number of drunken drivers on the road, thereby reduce the number of people each year who are killed at the hands of drunken drivers.

This was supposed to be a four-year grant — at about $350,000 a year — but the state’s Traffic Safety Bureau recently passed on the word that they were canceling the last year of the grant because they no longer thought this component of the program was necessary.

The program provided funds to put five DWI coordinators in the areas of the state that had the worst drunken driving problems — McKinley, San Juan, Bernallilo, Dona Anna and Rio Arriba counties. Their job was to publicize increased law enforcement efforts in those areas in nontraditional ways.

The state had its own public information officers who contacted the state’s newspapers and radio and television stations, but it also wanted someone to go out and pass the word at some nontraditional sources, where people who abuse alcohol would also get the word — sporting events, chapter meetings, etc.

“I would like to say that we did our jobs so well that we worked ourselves out of a job,” said Linda Atkinson, executive director of the program, “but what we do is hard to measure.”

She said one of the problems Lopez and the other outreach coordinators faced was going out there and telling people about increased law enforcement efforts when, in some instances, there was no increased effort.

While Lopez is making plans to work in a non-DWI job, Atkinson said her office has asked her to keep in touch because it is seeking funding for other programs which may be established in Gallup in the near future.

One of these programs deals with working with those businesses that sell liquor and making sure that they are aware of their responsibilities to inform law enforcement if they see someone in public who is drunk and what steps they should take to protect the public.

Another program which is just a couple of months from being put into operation is one that uses an interactive map to pinpoint which areas are the most likely to see DWI activity so that law enforcement agencies would be able to focus most of their attention in these areas.