On March 6 the Davis City Council voted unanimously to postpone the Davis City Minor Alcohol Preclusion Ordinance. If passed, the legislation would have given police the ability to cite those under-21 who were intoxicated in public beyond a Blood Alcohol Content of .01.
We are glad that the ordinance will not be going into effect anytime soon, and we commend the UC Davis students who fought hard to oppose the measure. We are frustrated that the ordinance was proposed in the first place and can be reintroduced at a later date.
Furthermore, it is troubling that the city council did not vote to scrap the measure altogether, instead opting to open the ordinance for revision. This legislation has already been revised twice and there is no amount of alteration that will alleviate the frustration felt by the UC Davis students on this matter. After the amount of student involvement surrounding this ordinance, the city council should realize the measure is both unwarranted and unwanted.
The measure is both unenforceable and inconvenient, as we have noted in the past. But more than anything, it is frustrating that the ordinance attempts to solve a problem that simply does not exist. There are already laws in place that prevent anyone from being drunk and disorderly in public, which already limits anyone from disturbing citizens while drunk in town.
This additional proposed ordinance is nothing more than an attack on UC Davis students. Drinking is part of college culture, and by attempting to pass this type of puritanical statute, certain members of the Davis community are trying to impose their own moral views regarding alcohol on the students. UC Davis students are residents of this town and should be given the same respect and courtesy afforded to other citizens.
The City of Davis should focus its attention on solving more pertinent city problems, such as the Fifth Street Corridor, and spend less time on restricting students from engaging in long-accepted recreational practices.
