Risky drinking coalition salutes 10 years, hails groups for continuing
LaCrosse Tribune
By Mike Tighe
June 27, 2017
WISCONSIN – Members of the Changing the Culture of Risky Drinking Behavior Coalition toasted 10 years of efforts to curb binge and heavy drinking Tuesday — and lifted their glasses of water and tea and cups of coffee to the fact that several groups are stepping up to continue the quest.
However, about 25 people who attended the celebratory luncheon, who gathered to acknowledge the expiration of the final funding grant Friday, weren’t resting on their laurels.
“We’ve accomplished a lot,” said Catherine Kolkmeier, executive director of the La Crosse Medical Health Science Consortium, the grant funnel for the coalition. “But for sustainability — this is my favorite part — several parts will live elsewhere.”
The Gateway Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America will assume coordination of the Oktoberfest Family Zone, a 700-foot stretch of Oktoberfest’s 2-mile parade that is alcohol- and smoke-free and formerly under community support.
The Parents Who Host initiative intended to halt underage drinking will continue under the auspices of the La Crosse County Prevention Network.
The Social Host program, through which the coalition persuaded several municipalities to pass ordinances with penalties for adults who supply alcohol at youth parties, hit what Kolkmeier described as a “bump in the road” when Wisconsin’s Appeals Court District 2 invalidated the law in Fond du Lac County last year. But it will rise again with language proposed to be added to state underage drinking laws.
The Responsible Beverage Service Training, which trained nearly 500 bartenders and hotel/restaurant servers and more than 400 volunteer servers for Oktoberfest and Riverfest, will survive with members of the La Crosse Police Department providing the training. The city council recently approved the addition of $5 to each bar license to buy materials for the training.
Another Burden of Risky Alcohol report will be completed under the guidance of Brenda Rooney, medical director of Gundersen Health System’s Community and Preventive Care Services, who helped craft the coalition’s first grant request.
That request, which gained a $50,000 planning grant from the Healthier Wisconsin Partnership Program of the Medical College of Wisconsin, helped cover planning for the coalition in 2007. The coalition also earned a $150,000 HWPP Impact Grant for underage access efforts from 2009 to 2012 and an HWPP Implementation Grant of $750,000 covering alcohol policy initiatives between 2012 and the last day of the grant Friday.
The coalition also received nearly $320,000 in a Strategic Prevention Framework Incentive Grant from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services between 2010 and 2013.
“I think we made good progress” during the decade, Rooney said during an interview Tuesday. “We made more progress among youths, but not adults so much.”
Asked to account for the youth progress, Rooney lamented that, in part, “it is possibly because high school and college students are finding other ways to get high with other drugs.”
Among adults, “binge drinking is easier and legal,” she said, adding that the trend is toward more binge drinking among middle-aged women and heavy drinking among middle-aged and older women.
Rooney attributed that trend to a combination of stress and intense marketing to that age and gender group.
“The marketing is making it more a part of the social norm,” she said.
On the other hand, the coalition has been able to increase awareness of alcohol abuse, she said.
“Without it, we’d be a lot worse off,” Rooney said.
Echoing that sentiment was former La Crosse Police Chief Ed Kondracki, who is president of the coalition, who said, “During 20 years as chief, I saw binge drinking become a phenomenon in La Crosse and across the country.”
Ending binge drinking “sounds like an impossible task,” but efforts must continue, Kondracki said, noting that he had called the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in for consultation because excessive drinking was blamed for nearly 10 drownings along the Mississippi River.
With a few more drownings since then, he said, the coalition strives to treat causes instead of just symptoms.
“It’s reassuring to see so many people in La Crosse involved and a broad base of community organizations trying to end binge drinking,” he said.
Representatives of state and national groups cite La Crosse efforts as a model for the country, he said.
The former police chief said it is especially gratifying to see police officers involved — from the beginning and continuing now.
“Police are a part of the community, not apart from the community,” he said.