Council Bans Smoking, Chewing Tobacco in Parks

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

March 25 -- Lighting a single stogie in any City park could cost a smoker 62 packs-worth of cigarette money in fines under a new ban the City Council adopted on its first reading Tuesday.

Under the ordinance, anyone at a park caught smoking or disposing on the ground any tobacco-related product -- including chewing tobacco spit -- will be punished with a $250 fine.

With the formal adoption of the "curb to curb" ban on smoking within parks citywide, Santa Monica will join a handful of cities, including Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Carson, which have extended to entire parks a statewide ban on smoking within 25 feet of playgrounds and tot lot areas.

However, at the request of a community member and several council members, Santa Monica's ordinance will not only include all tobacco use -- smoking as well as chewing -- but smoking of any kind -- from tobacco to marijuana.

"Our law differs from the state law and will make enforcement easier because anyone blowing any kind of smoke will be subject to it," said Councilman Robert Holbrook. He added that the ban would get rid "of those guys in Palisades Park who smoke marijuana on the benches every morning" when his daughter jogs through the park.

Responding to a health advocate's request that the council broaden the law's language to include chewing tobacco, Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown worried that a ban on chewing would be unenforceable, because "you would never know what the person is chewing."

McKeown also cautioned that the basis of the ordinance would have to be widened to include chewing tobacco, since the local law was introduced to curb second hand smoke. "If I chew tobacco," McKeown said, "you don't get cancer."

City Attorney Marsha Moutrie, however, noted that while chewing tobacco is not an airborne environmental pollutant like smoking, the chewer is being harmed.

In addition, she said, chewing tobacco "provides a bad model for children, and also is dirty and unsanitary," because the chewer "is also spitting (something)…which someone might ingest."

In addition to second hand smoke, the ban was intended to stop children from imitating self-destructive behavior and possibly digesting disposed cigarette butts, according to the staff report.

Holbrook thought the chewing ban went too far. "I personally don't observe a lot of people walking around with a wad of chewing tobacco in their cheek," Holbrook said. "I think we're going a ways here."

After chewing it over, the Council voted 6 to 1 to include chewing tobacco under the ban on disposing all tobacco related products in public parks. (Council member Pam O'Connor dissented because she believed "the state law already adequately addresses the issue.")

Local community activist Jerry Rubin praised the "common sense" ordinance. "This is not taking rights away from people, it gives to people the right to go to the park and not be attacked by cigarette smoke, which is more of a right."

But to council regular Joy Fulmer, it made no sense. "Why not (ban smoking) in the Mall," she said, likely referring to the Third Street Promenade. "There's lots of kids there, and we're not saying you can't smoke in the Mall. To me that makes no sense."

The council's action followed the Recreation and Parks Commission's unanimous vote in June recommending that the City adopt the no smoking policy.

A tremendous show of community support in favor of the measure swayed the commission, which also recommended using a combination of community education and park signage to inform the public of the new smoke-free policy.

Community members at the June meeting and at a subsequent council meeting complained that smokers extinguished their cigarette butts in sand pits, turning the public children play area into ashtrays, and exposed children to second-hand smoke, as well as to unhealthy behavior they might imitate.

Opponents of the ban said it was driven by the "non-smokers moral code of the world" and claimed that no studies have conclusively linked outdoor smoking to negative health effects on children.