Suspected drunken drivers who refuse a breath test in Bexar County are now subject to a mandatory blood draw every day of the year under a dramatic expansion of a “no refusal” policy that had been limited to weekends, officials announced.

“I think we're making history today,” District Attorney Susan Reed said at a news conference Monday. “We are now the largest metro area in Texas to have an absolute no-refusal policy.”

A $1.4 million grant from the Texas Department of Transportation will bolster enforcement efforts by the San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, but officers from virtually all local law enforcement agencies will be able to get warrants and have blood tested for driving-while-intoxicated cases.

Officials credited the weekend policy for a sharp drop in the number of intoxication manslaughter cases so far this year. In both 2009 and 2010, the period from January through September saw 13 such cases filed. This year, the number dropped to six.

Jennifer Northway, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving-South Texas, said the reduction shows what can be accomplished when agencies work together.

“I look forward to coming back in 2012 and saying that we are fatality-free,” she said.

Reed said the TxDOT grant will cover the policy's expenses for a year and that she hoped the city and county would incorporate money in future budgets to continue it.

Police Chief William McManus said, “It sends a strong message to everyone out there that if you come to Bexar County, you're not going to get off on a technicality.”

Reed began the policy on Memorial Day weekend in 2008, continued it on major holiday weekends and secured law enforcement's cooperation to expand it in January to cover all weekends from 5 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Monday.

The bulk of the grant will go to the SAPD and the Sheriff's Office, which received $556,482 and $524,837 respectively, for their DWI selective traffic enforcement programs.

The money to pay for blood testing services handled by the Bexar County medical examiner's office will come from $180,000 received by the district attorney's office.

The MADD affiliate will get $150,000 to run its Take the Wheel educational program.

Both the SAPD and the Sheriff's Office will use the money to pay patrol officers overtime to look for suspects.

The sheriff's portion of the money will also target speeding, which typically goes hand in hand with drunken driving, “and that's double trouble,” Sheriff Amadeo Ortiz said.

Officers made 6,951 arrests for DWI in 2010 in Bexar County and have made 5,024 so far this year, according to statistics from the district attorney's office.

On weekends this year, officers have made full use of mandatory blood draws — blood samples were obtained in 1,989 cases this year, with more than half of them, 1,043, under warrants obtained with the no-refusal policy. The rest were already required by law or obtained with the suspect's consent.

Mandatory blood draws have been criticized by some defense lawyers and civil libertarians. Jamie Balagia, an attorney with a DWI defense practice here who has styled himself the “DWI Dude” in advertisements, said Monday that the policy was a “ridiculous trampling of our Constitution.”

Blood samples are already mandatory when someone is killed or in other circumstances, he said, so the extended policy impacts “boilerplate DWIs” with “no significant aggravating circumstances.”

“I don't drink, but I might drink an O'Doule's (a nonalcoholic brew) that smells like beer, so if I spill some on my shirt and my eyes are always red because I have allergies, and a policeman stops me because I have a defective license plate (and) I have a knee injury and I cannot pass agility tests ... that is enough to arrest me, take me to jail and take my blood with a warrant,” Balagia said.

“None of that is proof of intoxication. But the judge will rubber-stamp the warrant and take my blood because I did not give them evidence,” he said. “That is un-American.”

McManus and others have called drunken driving a major public safety problem here, and police have devoted attention to tracking its geography and deploying officers and new equipment to “hot spots” in the city.

But when such cases go to trial, there has been a 50 percent acquittal rate for defendants who refused breath tests and were not compelled to provide a blood sample, Reed said. She referred to a TV crime drama in calling it the result of a “CSI effect” on juries that want to see hard evidence.

“Fifty percent — that's a huge number. Our juries are going to know that we are bringing them the evidence,” Reed said.