“Team DUI” is inviting all concerned parents, students and county residents to the meeting, which will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. Nov. 28 at Lower Lake High School, 9430 Lake St.
The Team DUI effort includes participation from the District Attorney's Victim-Witness division, county Alcohol and Other Drug Services, Lake Family Resource Center's Tobacco Control Program, the Safe Schools Healthy Students Program and the California Highway Patrol, according to Clearlake Mayor Judy Thein, one of the founding members.
Wednesday's meeting will offer the community a chance to find out what local organizations are doing to prevent high risk and underage drinking, said Thein. It's also a chance for residents to voice their own concerns and learn how they can help the effort.
Team DUI gets started
Team DUI has resulted from the collaboration over the last year by a several local agencies and individuals, whose goal is to reduce underage drinking and driving under the influence.
For Thein, activism came in the wake of tragedy: her daughter, Kellie, was killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver in December 2005.
On Sept. 18 of last year, on what would have been her daughter's birthday, Thein attended a Board of Supervisors meeting, where Sam Laird of Victim-Witness presented a report on the Driving Under the Influence Vertical Prosecution Program.
The District Attorney's Office had received a two-year, $307,936 grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, which funded a full-time prosecutor and a part-time investigator to work exclusively on DUI cases, according to Laird's original report.
The program's primary goal, Laird's memo to the board noted, “is to provide prosecution and education to reduce alcohol-related collisions and reduce student drinking and driving.”
The grant was important, Laird told the board, because Lake County “has a disproportionate level of alcohol-related fatal and injury collisions, a DUI arrest rate nearly double the state rate, and about 30 percent of high school students drinking and driving.”
Thein had contacted Laird prior to the meeting to let him know she planned to attend to show her support for the grant. “It was at this Board of Supervisors meeting that Sam Laird and I met and began moving forward with the education of reducing alcohol-related collisions and reduction of underage drinking.”
At the time, she said, she was in the “beginning stages of becoming an activist in Lake County for DUI reduction awareness.”
She and Laird began working together on DUI prevention, with Laird inviting her to Oakland in October 2006 to speak with Victim-Witness advocates in training. There, Thein said, she shared with them her experiences losing her daughter to a DUI collision.
Last November, she and Laird organized their first town hall meeting featuring a DUI panel of speakers who discussed how to reduce alcohol-related collisions and reduce student drinking and driving. Thein said she received a lot of encouragement from community members to continue her work on the issue.
The work has continued this year. In the spring, she organized speakers on DUI prevention at the weekly Judge's Breakfast in Clearlake, issued a proclamation to Laird in April for National Crime Victims Rights Week in the City of Clearlake.
In May, Alcohol and Other Drug Services invited Thein to speak at a youth summit on underage drinking, where she met Erica Harrison, a teen driver who had been seriously injured while driving drunk. Since then, Thein and Harrison have spoken to groups of students at local schools about the dangers of underage drinking.
The informal beginning of Team DUI came in June, when Thein met with Carrie White and Catherine Rose of Alcohol and Other Drug Services to discuss how they could work together to reduce DUI and underage drinking. In August, Sam Laird and Crystal Martin of Victim-Witness and California Highway Patrol Officer Adam Garcia joined the effort.
During the summer, Thein also introduced an underage drinking ordinance that was accepted in Clearlake, with a similar version subsequently accepted in Lakeport. The Board of Supervisors is due to consider its own version of the ordinance Dec. 4.
Thein said the group – not yet called Team DUI – gave its first presentations in September at Carle High School, Clearlake Community School and Lower Lake High School.
Support for the effort continued to grow, she said, with the Lake County Office of Education's Safe Schools Healthy Students program joining the partnership in October. Also adding their support were Clearlake Vice Mayor Curt Giambruno, Clearlake Police Chief Allan McClain and Michael Rupe, program director of the county's Tobacco Control Program.
But Thein said it wasn't until October that the “Team DUI” materialized.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) inspired the entire effort, said Thein, as did Denise Stelzer, Thein's Victim-Witness advocate from Lassen County, where her daughter's fatal crash occurred.
Thein said the credit for getting Team DUI to where it is today belongs to all of its participants. “Each member of Team DUI brings their own special uniqueness to the partnership, making us whole in order to educate our county on the consequences of drinking and driving.”
To find out more about Team DUI or to get involved, call Judy Thein at 994-8201.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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