One N.H. legislator wants to make it legal to drink and bicycle.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – One state lawmaker wants to increase the penalties for driving drunk with a child in the car, while another wants to make it legal to drink and bicycle.

A third lawmaker is proposing two bills for the next legislative session that would set penalties for hit-and-run boating or snowmobiling.

Rep. Robert L-Heureux, R-Merrimack, wants to enhance the charge for anyone caught drinking and driving with a passenger under 16 to aggravated DWI. The enhanced charge also would apply to drunken boaters and snowmobilers with children as passengers.

L’Heureux said adults should pay a higher price for drunken driving when they jeopardize children.

“We’re doing everything we can to protect the kids,” L’Heureux said.

On the other hand, state Sen. Frank Sapareto, R-Derry, says the Legislature sometimes goes overboard. He is sponsoring a bill that would exempt bicycles and other self-propelled vehicles from drunken driving laws.

Sapareto cited the case of Timothy Bradley, 44, who was arrested in Londonderry for riding his mountain bike after drinking. Bradley’s driver’s license had been suspended after a DWI conviction in Massachusetts the previous year.

Sapareto said Bradley should have been commended for riding his bicycle, not punished. He goes to trial Jan. 12 in Derry District Court.

“This person was going to a bar. He could have taken his keys out, driven to the bar and driven home in a 4,000-pound vehicle, drunk,” Sapareto said. Instead, he decided “to drive a 30-pound bicycle home, and we’re going to charge this guy with drunk driving?”

Sapareto also hopes to derail a bill that would make it a crime to host an underage drinking party. The bill passed the House, and will come before the full Senate this year. Sapareto was the lone opponent on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We don’t want kids to drink, but what we’re doing is punishing everyone involved,” he said. “We’re trying to find everybody else in the world to blame in our crusade to punish people, and in so doing we lose more and more of our freedoms.”

State Sen. Robert Flanders, R-Antrim, wants to close a loophole in the state’s boating laws that allowed a Meredith man to escape punishment for leaving the accident scene after his boat struck another boat on Meredith Bay.

Daniel Littlefield’s boat crushed and killed Jack Hartman, 69, of Bedford, on Aug. 11, 2002. Littlefield was convicted of negligent homicide in June.

The trial judge noted at Littlefield’s sentencing that he would have faced an additional charge of “conduct after an accident” had he been driving a car instead of a boat.

Flanders’ proposed bill would make leaving the scene of a boating accident a misdemeanor in cases of property damage and a Class B felony if injury or death results.

Flanders also wants to make sure the state’s off-road vehicles laws include similar language, after a snowmobiler struck a dogsledder and left the injured man lying in the snow last February.

Earlier this month, the snowmobile driver, Denis Lancey, 30, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conduct after an accident. Under a plea agreement with prosecutors, he will spend a year in jail.

The musher, Stephen Hessert, 51, of Cumberland, did not object to the plea deal, according to the Coos County attorney’s office. He is still recovering from his injuries and multiple surgeries.

AP-ES-11-23-03 1559EST