Alcohol leading cause of problem at lake

Is it time to consider a ban on alcohol at Greenbelt Lake?

That’s a question being raised by Donley County Sheriff Butch Blackburn after a series of calls received by his office over the July Fourth weekend.

Blackburn says 90 percent of the 911 calls from Greenbelt are alcohol related, and he also says those calls are getting rougher.

“We’re getting more calls with guns or other types of weapons involved,” Blackburn said.

Carson County officials this week are investigating a case where a woman allegedly shot and killed her boyfriend Sunday. The couple was returning from Greenbelt, and alcohol was involved according to published reports. Blackburn said that case could have happened in Donley County.

“That’s how close we came,” Blackburn said. “There has not been a killing at Greenbelt that I know of; but if things don’t change, I won’t be surprised if we do have one.”
Greenbelt Water Authority General Manager Bobbie Kidd said his board kicked around the idea of a ban on alcohol several years ago but never took any kind of action on the subject, but he said it may be time to bring it back up.

“I think the ‘no alcohol’ deal is something we’ll have to look at again,” Kidd said.

Kidd said he couldn’t say the situation at the lake is getting worse, but he did agree that 90 percent of the calls from the lake were probably alcohol related and agreed that those calls can be rough.

Lake Meredith has a partial ban on alcohol, Kidd said, and only allows alcohol in certain areas and prohibits open containers after midnight.

“I don’t think we could have a partial ban,” Kidd said. “I think it would have to be a total ban.”

Kidd said he would hate to see it come to a situation where a guy couldn’t have a cold beer while he’s fishing, but also noted that Greenbelt gets a lot of inebriated visitors and that alcohol does play a role in a lot of drowning at the lake.

Thirteen people were arrested from last Thursday through Sunday, the sheriff’s office said. All of those were alcohol related, and all were at or near Greenbelt Lake.

People arrested at the lake cannot return, Kidd said, noting that Greenbelt is private property.
“We have a hard and fast rule: If you get arrested at our lake, you get banned from the lake,” Kidd said.
Among the calls this weekend from the lake, Blackburn noted these alcohol-related cases:

• At 4:18 a.m. on Saturday a fight started over someone urinating next to someone else’s tent and, during this, someone fired a .12-gauge shotgun in the air.
• At 7:13 p.m. on Friday a fight broke out over a campsite.
• At 1:50 Saturday morning a female had a diving accident near Sandy Beach.
• “One idiot” stabbed himself in the leg after he got off a boat with a knife and tried to swim to shore.
• A person nearly drowned on Friday but was rescued by someone on the shore who saw them bobbing in the water.

One side effect to a ban on alcohol might be how it would impact traffic at the lake. From Monday through Sunday, Greenbelt sold approximately 8,000 lake permits, and Kidd said over the weekend between 3,000 and 4,000 people were at the lake.

Kidd said an impact on traffic wouldn’t bother him.
“I wouldn’t really care,” he said. “You’d lose some people and probably gain some other people.”

The sheriff said he believes fifty percent of the people coming to the lake are just here to party and that many of them have criminal histories and no respect for rules or laws.

“It’s just sad that [the water authority] has done so much work out there and we have so many family people go and can’t have a good time because of the thugs that show up,” the sheriff said.