Drunk drivers are getting a free ride from bar owners in Houston/Harris County. An investigative story by KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston, Texas on Wednesday, Nov. 24, revealed some damning statistics about the apparent lackadaisical enforcement of a Texas law that orders bar owners to stop serving drinks to patrons they believe are intoxicated.

The station’s investigative reporter team poured over five years of Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission documents and learned that the TABC cited bars just 22 times for serving drunks during that period while it cited them 4,982 times for other violations.  

The bars are slipping through a legal loophole that easily lets them off the hook. It’s called the Safe Harbor law and it is the only one of its kind in the United States, according to the station’s report. It makes life for liquor license owners simple. All bar owners have to do to remain within the law is post liquor serving laws, make sure bartenders and waitresses have TABC approved training and that no one is encouraging patrons to break the state’s driving laws.  

How did those provisions end up in a Texas law? According to the KHOU-TV report, Bob McFarland, the former State Senator who sponsored the law in 1987, said it was designed to make bars safer by ensuring that all servers had TABC certification so they could easily spot patrons who were drunk. McFarland admitted that state liquor interests wanted the law, brought it to him and lobbied for it as a safety measure. In the KHOU-TV interview, he still maintained the Safe Harbor law was “a good deal” for the state of Texas.  

According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Houston/Harris County is rife with drunk  drivers. An official with that organization told KHOU-TV that Harris County has more drunk drivers “than any other county in the nation.”   

For its part, the TABC says it would like to force bars to stop over serving patrons but its “hands are tied.” Under the Safe Harbor law, bar owners are protected from fines for continuing to serve obviously inebriated patrons. So bars are safe under a law that puts drunks in cars and leaves others in mortal danger as drunk driving fatalities in Harris County reveal. Drivers still have to contend with getting a DUI citation if they are caught behind the wheel when they are intoxicated. But bar owners are off the hook for putting them there.