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“We can make a difference in a problem that is bringing our whole community down, and we can confront the overuse of alcohol in our community, starting with prevention when children are young, to tough enforcement for chronic offenders,” Falk said.

Spread among initiatives like addressing alcohol problems in middle schools and an additional 1,000 hours of patrols looking for drunken drivers on Friday and Saturday nights, an addition of $250,000 will add up in the Dane County budget proposal.

“All you have to do is drive down State Street at bar time if you want to find trouble, and this will help us keep our jail at capacity, and it will help us save taxpayer money,” said Brett Hulsey, chair of Dane County’s Personnel and Finance Committee. “So this is a smart investment, not just the right thing to do.”

Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney said the county issued 137 citations for drunken driving in 2007, and Falk added nearly 50 percent of sentenced inmates in Dane County Jail are in on alcohol-related offenses.

“The Dane County Sheriff’s office has been and continues to be committed to turning that trend around,” Mahoney said.

Falk said the roots of this problem lie in Wisconsin’s deeply rooted drinking culture.

“The culture is set by all of us; that’s why we’re hoping that we can change it, because we are the culture,” she said. “There’s nobody else making us behave the way we have been in Wisconsin, we choose to do this, so we can change it.”

Falk added a set of initiatives focused on fighting this culture would be announced in October. She said if the county could effect change in such “tough issues” as cigarette smoking and recycling, it should be able to work on alcohol as well.

Funding in the new initiatives will also flow to training Dane County staff members and collaborating nonprofit staff members in “brief motivational interviewing,” a conversation with repeat offenders intended to evoke the offender’s own reason for change.

“In a 15-minute trained interview, you can solicit the most amazing and cost-effective results of people being motivated to change,” Falk said.

The county also aims to expand a program now in high schools to two middle schools as a pilot to reach young people. According to a nationwide survey of middle school students, one in three Wisconsin students in seventh and eighth grades has participated in binge drinking, with one-fifth of those students repeating the behavior in a year.

“Eighth graders are those most prone to change, and those are the individuals we need to reach out and get that message to,” Mahoney said. “We need to get it to the 12th graders and those in college, but to change behavior, we need to reach them by eighth grade.”

The two schools selected to expand the program have yet to be determined.