The Story County Sheriff’s Office and the Ames Police Department currently are testing new breathalyzers.

The pilot program, created in cooperation with the Iowa Department of Public Safety, began on March 31 in Story and Johnson counties.

The purpose of testing the new breathalyzers is to gauge how officers respond to the new apparatus, said Lt. Gary Foster of the Story County Sheriff’s Office.

Foster said Story County was picked for the test because of its high quantity of drunken driving offenses and the willingness of County Attorney Stephen Holmes to prosecute without plea bargaining.

The main difference between the new breathalyzer and the old one is ease of use, Foster said.

“It’s just going to be a little bit more modern,” he said. “They are more user friendly.”

The easier a breathalyzer is to use, the more accurate results will be.

“With the ease of operation comes a smaller margin of error,” he said. “There will just be less ways that an officer can make a mistake.”

Foster said many of the manual adjustments required on the old breathalyzer are automatic on the new breathalyzer.

“On the old machine you had to go through a checklist and make sure to get all the air out of the machine, to make sure there was no residual air that contained alcohol,” he said.

Ames Police Chief Dennis Ballantine also said the new machines are much easier to operate.

“It will have a digital readout; it walks the officer right through everything instead of checking a cheat sheet — it’s just more modern,” he said.

Ballantine said the new breathalyzers would allow the state to have much more control over its data.

“These are going to be hooked in through a modem, and the state can pull the data out,” he said. “That will give them a lot more data.”

The state also might be able to fix minor problems with the breathalyzers over the Internet, he said.

The new breathalyzers require a training session to operate, and so far, 74 officers throughout the county have been trained during four sessions.

Although the program began March 31, Ballantine said he wasn’t sure if it actually has been used in Ames yet.

“But the [officers] that have gone through the training have been completely supportive of it,” he said.

If the breathalyzers pass the test, Ballantine said the rest of the state probably will switch to the new machines.