Keeping PACE
The last think I think we need in this country, region, state, county, city, campus is more laws and regulation based on moral 'standards'.
I love this campus, I love this university, but I do not even so much as hold a neutral opinion about the people who run this university. I am convinced the Board of Regents have a desire to ruin what the University of Wisconsin is.
More than three years ago the Regents formed a committee who's sole purpose was oversight on any and all Alcohol related issues, transactions, and service in the city of Madison, they called it PACE, Policy Alternative Community Education project. They will not leave students here alone. They have a very short list of accomplishments, and even fewer of them are positive from anyone's perspective. First, they extended the hours of operation at the 2 workout / recreation facilities on campus on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. In three years, that is the only thing positive they have done.
Since that, their only accomplishment was the artificial raising of prices of downtown Madison bars by pressuring bar owners into a Thursday-Saturday drink special ban; after all, PACE did have a say in who alcohol licenses are given to. They insisted this ban would help curbing binge drinking among students. Anyone who has been to college could have pointed out to them that their actions would do no such thing, and it didn’t. The statistics showed pre-ban and during ban numbers of “alcohol related” incidents did not show even the slightest decrease. PACE’s measures were statistically insignificant. A lack of specials didn’t cause anyone to drink less, just put a few more dollars in the bar owners’ pockets and eventually the city’s through taxes.
Luckily enough, a small group of Madison alumni filed for a class action lawsuit against the bar owners in the spring / summer of 2004 calling the specials ban “price fixing” and monopolistic. While the bar owners may not have been to blame for the artificial price hike, the lawsuit threat removed the bans and students can once again drink on the weekend and have about $4 more left in their pocket. All studies done related to the specials ban showed no less drinks were bought, only more expensive drinks.
PACE and university officials worked from a new angle since September 2005 though that has turned PACE from a mere annoyance into a threat to this campus in my mind. Around mid, late October, the university, and PACE, has been trying to shame us by saying that from the start of the fall semester to early November there have been 30 kids sent to detox centers. How terrible is 30 out of about 45000 students, 0.06% of the students. Or how the administration publicly claims that that is the worse in the Big Ten, and yet have never released any numbers of how that compares to other universities.
As a small personal note, every survey I've ever taken, on this campus or otherwise, has defined a 'binge' as more than 3 drinks in an hour or “in one sitting." If I had 3 beers in 1 hour I would be mildly buzzed. One might also wonder, what is a sitting? Does it mean one bar? If I go out to a bar, stay from midnight to 2am and have 5 drinks I might as well stay home, I'm barely gonna be buzzed. Goddamn right I'm a binge drinker in PACE’s eyes. I might as well get soda all night because my BAC is going to be about 0.0 at that pace. Or one house party maybe? Hell you go through 3 cans of beer in a standard game of Beer Pong! That certainly isn't enough for even the lightest of drinkers to get sick, or become seriously drunk. Apparently I need to 'binge' to feel accepted with the growing 'peer pressure' to drink here.
The worst part is they released their claims in the most public way possible, what they are really doing, is ruining our school’s image, and I don’t know why. Maybe they thought it would curb our drinking if they kept telling us we’re the worst students they ever had come through the school. I don’t think so, but I do resent them attacking mine and their reputation in order to gain some kind of public support for their policies. It obvious to me that the administration’s ability to control the students in ways they have no business doing is more important to them than upholding the great long standing reputation. Not only does the University of Wisconsin-Madison happen to be ranked as high as Ivy League school in academics, 34 in the nation overall at the moment, 8th if you consider only public universities, but continues to be in the top 10 party schools for as long as I can remember. That is an impressive feat, a diploma from UW-Madison has a tangle respect in this nation and the administration is currently trying to tarnish that reputation to serve their own ends, and that should be considered an unforgivable act which cannot possibly serve to better our education.
The most recent and hopefully last motion PACE attempts to legislate is a keg registration law. This law would force liquor stores to keep a record of EVERY keg sold, who bought them, where the keg would be, and a signed document pledging the keg will only be served to Of-age people. These records would have to be maintained for a full year after the sale date, and the police would be allowed full access to this information, without any kind of reason or probable cause. The keg registration law would also permit only 1 keg to be registered to a single address without a permit purchased from the City of Madison.
I cannot as hard as I can think, see a reason to support this proposal, and neither did the Madison Police department when they dropped their support for it. Kegs of beer attract people, yes. The thinking is without multiple kegs, house parties (the declared enemy of PACE) will not get out of control, less people, less drinking, less problems. However what they do not seem to understand is that beer is their friend, it has a low alcohol content, it cannot be drunk in quantities large enough to be dangerous easily. By making kegs harder to come by, its not hard to think of viable alternatives like cheap handles of hard liquor. Unlike beer kegs, a bottle of vodka is can be mixed into drinks only god knows how strong and can be drunk extremely quickly. Shots, shooters, and very strong drinks are extremely hard to keep track of. One may never know how much they had to drink only drinking vodka, rum, Jack, and god knows what else. Injury and hospitalizations due to alcohol can only go up by discouraging beer drinking. Also as, you remember, the police has full right to inspect the records kept by the liquor stores at any time without any cause. Clearly its not hard to imagine an officer spending an hour on a Friday afternoon, listing all the addressed to drive around and inspect. Having a keg should not be considered probably cause, it reeks of extreme judgment and privacy invasion. No commercial transaction should be a handed over to any law enforcement official without some kind of investigation; this is not right and it frightens me that they think this is a legitimate way to curb drinking.
The police departments in Madison had even dropped their support for Keg registration days before it was voted on, and failed to pass after that. When it would seem campus was safe from PACE’s keg laws, the District 9 alderman of the City of Madison has reintroduced the bill to what end I cannot fathom. His district includes no part of campus or surrounding neighborhoods, what he could possibly want out of the keg registration, especially without the support from the Madison police officers who will be enforcing the law, is anyone’s guess. Maybe he should spend more time worrying about his neighborhood than meddling with students’ lives.
It amazes me how much influence PACE, an organization who clearly does not have the students’ best interest at hart, who have repeatedly failed to make any progress to their group’s goals, continue to be able to influence the legislation drafted and voted upon by the Madison legislators. Last Thursday an article appeared in the news paper that showed a typical interaction of the people of Madison, bar owners, and PACE.
A quote follows:
“The starter yelled, “Go!” and nine 96 oz. glass boots filled to the brim with beer were lifted from the bar and pressed against the lips of nine patrons.
Just a few minutes later, the team “Uhhhh, drink?” narrowly edged out “Sir Chuck Norris and His Mustache Riders” in a team speed drinking contest held Wednesday night at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry on North Frances Street.
As Dotty’s gave free french fries to the participants and as the bar calmed down from the cheers and screams of the contest, Dotty’s manager Rachael Stanley looked out across the Wednesday night crowd occupying the warmly-lit room and smiled.
“This is fun!” she said. “This was successful.”
However, some city officials would not agree with Stanley.
According to representatives of the Policy Alternative Community Education project, Wednesday night’s contest represented the side of Madison’s culture that needs to change.
Earlier this week, Sue Crowley, coordinator of the organization, spoke with Stanley and asked her to call off the event.
“We’re putting a lot of resources in trying to change the culture of this community that the only way to have a good time is to drink,” Crowley said in a phone interview. “This contest sends the message to students that it’s okay to drink as much as you can.””
Why the hell does drinking have to be a bad thing? Drink as much as you want, as much as you can, have a good fucking time, your not hurting anyone. How do people so clearly disconnected with the population of voters can possibly hope to achieve their aims, or stay in positions of power long enough to do this kind of damage.
I'm glad at least three people agree with me on this
I love this campus, I love this university, but I do not even so much as hold a neutral opinion about the people who run this university. I am convinced the Board of Regents have a desire to ruin what the University of Wisconsin is.
More than three years ago the Regents formed a committee who's sole purpose was oversight on any and all Alcohol related issues, transactions, and service in the city of Madison, they called it PACE, Policy Alternative Community Education project. They will not leave students here alone. They have a very short list of accomplishments, and even fewer of them are positive from anyone's perspective. First, they extended the hours of operation at the 2 workout / recreation facilities on campus on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. In three years, that is the only thing positive they have done.
Since that, their only accomplishment was the artificial raising of prices of downtown Madison bars by pressuring bar owners into a Thursday-Saturday drink special ban; after all, PACE did have a say in who alcohol licenses are given to. They insisted this ban would help curbing binge drinking among students. Anyone who has been to college could have pointed out to them that their actions would do no such thing, and it didn’t. The statistics showed pre-ban and during ban numbers of “alcohol related” incidents did not show even the slightest decrease. PACE’s measures were statistically insignificant. A lack of specials didn’t cause anyone to drink less, just put a few more dollars in the bar owners’ pockets and eventually the city’s through taxes.
Luckily enough, a small group of Madison alumni filed for a class action lawsuit against the bar owners in the spring / summer of 2004 calling the specials ban “price fixing” and monopolistic. While the bar owners may not have been to blame for the artificial price hike, the lawsuit threat removed the bans and students can once again drink on the weekend and have about $4 more left in their pocket. All studies done related to the specials ban showed no less drinks were bought, only more expensive drinks.
PACE and university officials worked from a new angle since September 2005 though that has turned PACE from a mere annoyance into a threat to this campus in my mind. Around mid, late October, the university, and PACE, has been trying to shame us by saying that from the start of the fall semester to early November there have been 30 kids sent to detox centers. How terrible is 30 out of about 45000 students, 0.06% of the students. Or how the administration publicly claims that that is the worse in the Big Ten, and yet have never released any numbers of how that compares to other universities.
As a small personal note, every survey I've ever taken, on this campus or otherwise, has defined a 'binge' as more than 3 drinks in an hour or “in one sitting." If I had 3 beers in 1 hour I would be mildly buzzed. One might also wonder, what is a sitting? Does it mean one bar? If I go out to a bar, stay from midnight to 2am and have 5 drinks I might as well stay home, I'm barely gonna be buzzed. Goddamn right I'm a binge drinker in PACE’s eyes. I might as well get soda all night because my BAC is going to be about 0.0 at that pace. Or one house party maybe? Hell you go through 3 cans of beer in a standard game of Beer Pong! That certainly isn't enough for even the lightest of drinkers to get sick, or become seriously drunk. Apparently I need to 'binge' to feel accepted with the growing 'peer pressure' to drink here.
The worst part is they released their claims in the most public way possible, what they are really doing, is ruining our school’s image, and I don’t know why. Maybe they thought it would curb our drinking if they kept telling us we’re the worst students they ever had come through the school. I don’t think so, but I do resent them attacking mine and their reputation in order to gain some kind of public support for their policies. It obvious to me that the administration’s ability to control the students in ways they have no business doing is more important to them than upholding the great long standing reputation. Not only does the University of Wisconsin-Madison happen to be ranked as high as Ivy League school in academics, 34 in the nation overall at the moment, 8th if you consider only public universities, but continues to be in the top 10 party schools for as long as I can remember. That is an impressive feat, a diploma from UW-Madison has a tangle respect in this nation and the administration is currently trying to tarnish that reputation to serve their own ends, and that should be considered an unforgivable act which cannot possibly serve to better our education.
The most recent and hopefully last motion PACE attempts to legislate is a keg registration law. This law would force liquor stores to keep a record of EVERY keg sold, who bought them, where the keg would be, and a signed document pledging the keg will only be served to Of-age people. These records would have to be maintained for a full year after the sale date, and the police would be allowed full access to this information, without any kind of reason or probable cause. The keg registration law would also permit only 1 keg to be registered to a single address without a permit purchased from the City of Madison.
I cannot as hard as I can think, see a reason to support this proposal, and neither did the Madison Police department when they dropped their support for it. Kegs of beer attract people, yes. The thinking is without multiple kegs, house parties (the declared enemy of PACE) will not get out of control, less people, less drinking, less problems. However what they do not seem to understand is that beer is their friend, it has a low alcohol content, it cannot be drunk in quantities large enough to be dangerous easily. By making kegs harder to come by, its not hard to think of viable alternatives like cheap handles of hard liquor. Unlike beer kegs, a bottle of vodka is can be mixed into drinks only god knows how strong and can be drunk extremely quickly. Shots, shooters, and very strong drinks are extremely hard to keep track of. One may never know how much they had to drink only drinking vodka, rum, Jack, and god knows what else. Injury and hospitalizations due to alcohol can only go up by discouraging beer drinking. Also as, you remember, the police has full right to inspect the records kept by the liquor stores at any time without any cause. Clearly its not hard to imagine an officer spending an hour on a Friday afternoon, listing all the addressed to drive around and inspect. Having a keg should not be considered probably cause, it reeks of extreme judgment and privacy invasion. No commercial transaction should be a handed over to any law enforcement official without some kind of investigation; this is not right and it frightens me that they think this is a legitimate way to curb drinking.
The police departments in Madison had even dropped their support for Keg registration days before it was voted on, and failed to pass after that. When it would seem campus was safe from PACE’s keg laws, the District 9 alderman of the City of Madison has reintroduced the bill to what end I cannot fathom. His district includes no part of campus or surrounding neighborhoods, what he could possibly want out of the keg registration, especially without the support from the Madison police officers who will be enforcing the law, is anyone’s guess. Maybe he should spend more time worrying about his neighborhood than meddling with students’ lives.
It amazes me how much influence PACE, an organization who clearly does not have the students’ best interest at hart, who have repeatedly failed to make any progress to their group’s goals, continue to be able to influence the legislation drafted and voted upon by the Madison legislators. Last Thursday an article appeared in the news paper that showed a typical interaction of the people of Madison, bar owners, and PACE.
A quote follows:
“The starter yelled, “Go!” and nine 96 oz. glass boots filled to the brim with beer were lifted from the bar and pressed against the lips of nine patrons.
Just a few minutes later, the team “Uhhhh, drink?” narrowly edged out “Sir Chuck Norris and His Mustache Riders” in a team speed drinking contest held Wednesday night at Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry on North Frances Street.
As Dotty’s gave free french fries to the participants and as the bar calmed down from the cheers and screams of the contest, Dotty’s manager Rachael Stanley looked out across the Wednesday night crowd occupying the warmly-lit room and smiled.
“This is fun!” she said. “This was successful.”
However, some city officials would not agree with Stanley.
According to representatives of the Policy Alternative Community Education project, Wednesday night’s contest represented the side of Madison’s culture that needs to change.
Earlier this week, Sue Crowley, coordinator of the organization, spoke with Stanley and asked her to call off the event.
“We’re putting a lot of resources in trying to change the culture of this community that the only way to have a good time is to drink,” Crowley said in a phone interview. “This contest sends the message to students that it’s okay to drink as much as you can.””
Why the hell does drinking have to be a bad thing? Drink as much as you want, as much as you can, have a good fucking time, your not hurting anyone. How do people so clearly disconnected with the population of voters can possibly hope to achieve their aims, or stay in positions of power long enough to do this kind of damage.
I'm glad at least three people agree with me on this
posted by Marc at
1:31 PM
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