GRAND FORKS (AP) - Starting a fight in a Grand Forks bar these days might get you kicked out the door, but all you've got to do is head over to the next watering hole where nobody knows your name.

If some area bar owners have their way, all the bars will know, and soon enough, you won't be able to get so much as a light beer without having to drive over to the next town.

The idea is for all the bars to compile a blacklist of troublemakers, said Josh Gilleland, the owner of Gilly's night club and two other bars.

A troublemaker might get banned for a few weeks for a first offense but it eventually could be for months, or forever.

Another use for the blacklist is to let bar owners know who's had too much to drink on a given night. The problem is especially pronounced downtown, where bars are close together.

Joe Black's owner Dennis Blackmun said the blacklist could be an invaluable tool.

"We know you just got kicked out of Crosstown," he said, imagining what he'd say to the troublemaker coming to his place. "Why do you think we're going to let you in here?"

The blacklisting scheme comes amid growing pressure from the public and city leaders to crack down on alcohol abuse and bar violence. Bar owners say the drinking and fighting may be no worse than it was before 1997, when the Red River flood wiped out downtown Grand Forks. But the pressure is on and the bar owners are unifying to come up with a solution.

Gilleland said he hopes to have an early version of the blacklist in place in two or three weeks.

"We want to set the tone and tell the public and the city officials that we're really wanting to be proactive and do our part," he said.

Bar owners are somewhat incredulous that they are seen as the cause of the problem.

Drunks are a liability for bars, Gilleland said, and highly intoxicated people get turned away at the door.

"It just ruins the whole mood in a bar if there's a fight," Blackmun said. "It scares girls. They feel unsafe. It gets guys' hormones going where 'I'm taking on the next guy that bumps into me.' It's the last thing you want."

"One bad apple can spoil a bunch, you know," said Joe Black's owner, Joe Schneider. "It's not worth it. It's not worth it for us."

Fortunately, the problem may be limited in scope.

"I felt like it was a very small percentage of people that came out to bars that were going to cause trouble," Gilleland said. "If we could eliminate those few people, it would greatly clean up the image of the hospitality industry in Grand Forks."

He said he came up with the blacklist idea after visiting Las Vegas. Many of the bars there are owned by a small number of businesses, he said, and they can blacklist with comparative ease.

That's not been so easy in Grand Forks, he said, because bar owners have seen one another more as rivals than as members of the same industry.

Initially, the blacklist probably would be just an e-mail list sent out each week.

If that works smoothly, bar owners could form a telephone tree to update the list more frequently.

The ideal, Gilleland said, is to have an electronic system that can scan drivers' licenses and compare them against an online database. Such a system could work in real time so that minutes after a drunken person gets shown the door for the night, all bars will know that person does not need another drink.

The danger is that different bars may apply different standards and some may even act in a discriminatory way.

Gilleland said he is working out details with attorneys. He said the blacklist may be just a recommendation from one bar to another so bar owners may, at their discretion, ignore the warnings of another bar owner.

The bottom line, he said, is "we really rely on the right to refuse service to anybody."