Parents who let teenagers booze at home face thousands of
dollars in penalties under a law enacted Wednesday night.
Morgan Hill – Parents who let teenagers booze at home face thousands of dollars in penalties under a law enacted Wednesday night.
The Social Host Ordinance, approved unanimously by the Morgan Hill City Council, carries a $1,000 fine for any adult who provides safe harbor for underage drinkers, even when the person has no idea that drinking is occurring at the property.
Absentee landlords, motel owners, parents away for a weekend and other violators can only be fined for breaking the law more than once in a 12-month period. But if they do, the bill can rack up fast: In addition to fines, the law allows the city to recover the costs of dispatching emergency services to break up “parties” of three or more underage drinkers.
“I’m glad to see we’re working toward a solution to stop the madness in the community,” said Joey Edgar, a Sobrato High School junior who worked on the ordinance with the area’s Community Substance Abuse Prevention Partnership. “I’ve seen plenty of friends become victims of alcohol at parties. I’m glad somebody’s doing something about it.”
Before joining in a 5-0 vote, council members Mark Grzan and Mary Lee repeated concerns about penalizing property owners for actions frequently out of their control, especially in the case of absentee landlords and motel owners.
“We want them to take it seriously,” Morgan Hill Police Chief Bruce Cumming responded. “We’re certainly not going to be heartless, but we do want to get their attention.”
A number of bars and motels already cooperate with the police department to prevent underage drinking, Cumming said, explaining that police would “use judgment” when deciding on penalties for businesses complying with the “spirit of the law.”
Many businesses, however, have spurned overtures by police to cooperate on programs to crack down on underage drinkers, the chief said. Council members directed Cumming to issue warnings and actively seek to engage such businesses before the law takes effect in late September.
The law is the handiwork of the substance-abuse partnership and South County Collaborative, an association of nonprofit groups that helped get a similar law passed earlier this summer in Gilroy. Police in that city have issued six citations since June, according to Cumming and Dina Campeau, chair of the South County Collaborative.
“We’re really pleased that it was a unanimous vote and that the city wants to send a strong message to the community that they want to change the environment and attitudes so that underage drinking is never OK,” she said. “Right now, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that alcohol is a rite of passage … There’s almost an attitude that it’s an inevitable thing, rather than it being our job to prevent this.”
The Wednesday approval concludes a year of work for the city, police department and volunteers like Campeau and Edgar. It expands and strengthens the police department’s existing enforcement tools by, among other things, doubling the cap on fines and narrowing the definition of a “social gathering” from 10 to three underage drinkers.
“The goal is not to impose fines, but rather to figure out how to eliminate a problem that exists in our community” Councilman Greg Sellers said before the final vote. “It’s about changing the culture, changing the attitude and how we approach this issue.”
