An effort to reform Utah's liquor laws by doing away with the unique private club law cleared its first hurdle Monday, amid debate over whether the change would increase or ease consumption and drunken driving accidents.

HB347 would give clubs the option of ditching the current private club rules -- which require that every patron have a membership or be a guest of a member -- and instead electronically scan guests' driver licenses to verify their age.

"This bill is not an attempt to loosen liquor laws, to increase consumption with minors," said sponsoring Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper. "I want to emphasize that this is a smarter way and a more efficient way to do what the private club law was meant to do."

The bill also has the backing of Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who believes the change would normalize Utah's liquor laws and help the tourism industry.

But Janie Brown, who, along with her husband, runs the Utah chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said the bill is poorly crafted and would make it difficult for law enforcement to track drinkers because there is no record keeping.

"It will increase DUI crashes and it will increase underage drinking," she said.

Sally Brinton, a mother of seven who lost a cousin in a drunken driving accident, said that Utah doesn't "need to be hip and cool" for tourists to visit, "nor do we want the grim death statistics that are borne out by [other] states."

"I can't stand here and let this bill go by with the destructive effects it would have," she said.

Art Cezares, the general manager of the Bambara Restaurant, said he frequently has to explain Utah's private club law to guests, and it is confusing and leaves them with a negative impression.

The House Business and Labor Committee gave the bill a favorable recommendation on an 8-5 vote. It now goes to the full House.

Hughes' bill would require anyone who appears to be under the age of 30 to have his or her license scanned. It would be encrypted and stored in the scanner, not uploaded to any central database, as some controversial proposals floated in the Senate had suggested.

Concerns about "Big Brother" prompted an effort to require the records to be purged after 24 hours, instead of 48 hours as the bill originally would have required. Instead, the committee amended it to store information for a week, in case it would be needed as part of a law enforcement investigation.

Hughes showed the committee a stack of fake IDs that had been confiscated from one private club in the span of a year to demonstrate how difficult it is to recognize a bogus license. The scanners, he said, would move the screening "miles ahead" of where it is now.

The bill would also do away with the so-called Zion Curtain, typically a plexiglass barrier at the end of a bar in a restaurant that prohibits passing a drink over the bar. Instead, Hughes' bill would let drinks be served over the bar, but nobody under 21 years of age could sit at the bar.