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One
Stop - New You - Right Now
This
proposed smoking ban has some fuming
A
San Francisco suburb may prohibit lighting up in multi-unit dwellings,
potentially drawing a new line in tobacco war.
By
Maria L. La Ganga, Times Staff Writer
January 29, 2007
BELMONT, CALIF.
— When the City Council of this San Francisco suburb voted
to consider what could be the most stringent tobacco regulation
in America, anti-smoking activists cheered. Banning smoking everywhere
but single-family detached homes and their yards would be a big
step forward, even in health-conscious California.
Then the blogosphere erupted. Side-by-side portraits of Councilwoman
Coralin Feierbach and Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler were posted
on a smoking-rights website. Threats were e-mailed to City Hall,
and police and prosecutors were called in to investigate.
A strict new ordinance is still set to be unveiled this winter for
more public discussion and an eventual vote. But instead of just
the flat-out ban on lighting up in apartments, condominiums and
public places that captured worldwide attention, City Atty. Marc
Zafferano said the first draft would be a menu of restrictions from
which council members could pick and choose.
So although Belmont may not make the kind of history envisioned
in the early headlines ("Belmont to be first U.S. city to ban
all smoking"), it still could make history of another sort,
by finding a line this tobacco-averse nation is unwilling to cross
— at least for the moment — in pursuit of better public
health.
"I don't know where the boundaries of a truly legally defensible
ordinance are," acknowledged Councilman Dave Warden, who is
pushing to pass "the strictest law possible."
"I really believe that we're really so close to the line that
no one can really tell," he said.
Even though nearly two-thirds of Americans have smoke-free policies
in their own homes, according to the 2000 census, restrictions on
smoking in multi-unit buildings, in the very sanctity of one's own
living room, constitute a new frontier in tobacco law.
The Belmont City Council is "breaking new ground," said
Jim Bergman, director of the Smoke-Free Environments Law Project,
who has advocated for smoking bans in multifamily buildings. "I
think the folks in Belmont have to be very careful in what they
do on this one…. There is always a question of how fast do
you move."
Twenty years ago, a proposal to prohibit smoking in condos and apartments
"would have been a radical and crazy idea," said Matthew
Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "Today,
it's an idea that's gaining growing acceptance, precisely because
the science has evolved and changed."
But though the U.S. surgeon general declared last year that there
is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke, acceptance may
not be here quite yet. Just check out the Internet responses to
the council's unanimous pre-holiday vote directing Zafferano to
draft the strict new ordinance.
"People of this country need to wake up before all of our rights
are diminished by these small interest groups and elected officials,"
wrote one reader on the San Mateo Daily Journal website. "You
go right ahead and get that deadly smoker, and ignore the biggest
killer of all, Booze," responded another.
Posters to smokers-rights websites such as http://www.speakeasyforum.com
were far angrier. Some likened elected officials in Belmont, population
24,522, to Nazis. Others suggested that readers flood the Police
Department with "possible smoking violation" calls or
e-mail Feierbach en masse.
"Makes you wish California would just secede, doesn't it?"
was one of the site's more polite comments.
The push for a smoke-free Belmont began last fall, when an elderly
resident of a senior housing complex called Bonnie Brae Terrace
wrote to the City Council. He wanted it to pass an ordinance proclaiming
secondhand smoke a nuisance.
Longtime resident Ray Goodrich, 82, got the idea earlier in the
year when the East Bay city of Dublin passed such a measure, which
makes it easier for people to take their neighbors to civil court
but is not enforced by police or code officers.
With his daughter, Becky Husmann, and a dozen or so neighbors, Goodrich
eventually went to City Hall to ask for help. Now the activists,
along with the City Council, have become a target of the vitriol.
"I've gotten e-mails: 'That's an old man complaining. He's
lived long enough,' " recalled an aghast Feierbach, who is
now mayor. Another wrote: "If I want to smoke next door to
some people who happen to have lung problems in an apartment, I
don't care. They're old. They deserve to die."
Warden argues that local sentiment is running "a little more
positive than negative." But smoke-ban boosters were in short
supply one recent afternoon in this hilly, wooded community of roomy
ranch houses and densely packed apartment buildings nestled between
San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.
Of a dozen shoppers and business owners interviewed at the Carlmont
Village Shopping Center, only two expressed wholehearted support
for the proposed ordinance.
"I'm a nonsmoker, and I'm all for it; I have asthma,"
said Alice Larson, 51, who was meeting a friend at a Mexican restaurant.
"We have a right to breathe clean air. I think it's a great
ordinance … I'm sure I'm in the minority."
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