Smoking Ban Anniversary / Early Childhood Development Spending
Hard to believe it's been a year since the voter approved smoking ban went into effect. What's the impact been? Cleaner air, certainly, for restaurant and bar patrons, and lots of violations. Tell us about your experience!
Remember another proposition on the ballot called First Things First? It hiked the tobacco tax and has raked in tens of millions of dollars for early childhood development. What's the money being spent on? We'll find out. If you have any questions or comments about it, let us know below.
Posted by
Paul Atkinson - Here and Now Producer at
11:00
|
Comments (3)
Hello,
I live and attend school in Mesa. I first heard of Mesa when NPR ran a piece on the unusually protective smoking regulations adopted, and that affected my decision to move here. When the state law took effect, some city employees in the office charged with enforcing Mesa's law mistakenly believed their law was superseded because something more authoritative came along. It took multiple communications to get them to acknowledge their continued responsibility for areas where city law provided more protection than state law—clause “M” in the state law, I believe.
City-code signs (which never indicated the “designated smoking areas only” policy anyway) have disappeared from Mesa Community College's Southern & Dobson campus, where signs now tell victims to report violations to the state, even when the signs are well beyond the areas regulated by the state law.
Unfortunately, while that 1996 city law forbids smoking outside of “designated smoking areas”—and sets standards for designating those areas—at schools, it took the shake-up over the state law and a lot of squawking to get ashtrays moved away from the doors at MCC.
The only difference the state law should have made at MCC is the removal of any smoking areas that were too close to windows or ventilation equipment, since the district already banned smoking in buildings or within 25 feet of the doors (including those with ashtrays serving as doorstops!). In reality, one year after its enactment, MCC is ~3 months into a “new policy”— at one campus—of establishing the smoking areas that are the only way the city law permits schools to allow smoking. Detractors are militant and unimpressed by the security force.
Beyond MCC, the college district's code of conduct forbids “conduct which threatens or endangers the health or safety of any person”. Somehow, the nation's number one cause of preventable death is exempted.
The state law (with a lot of push from me) opened dialog regarding the long-standing city law, and maybe when the smoke clears the smoke will have cleared.
In my experience, the state law has mostly confused things.
I attend a community college in Mesa, where an 11-year-old city law is more protective of nonsmokers than the new state law. Functionaries of both the college and the city have, at various times over the last year, mistakenly regarded the state law as superseding city law on the basis of authority, when both city and state documents clearly state that more restrictive measures are unaffected by the respective regulations.
The state law did facilitate raising the issue of the city law, which was being ignored on campus. Dozens of illegally placed ashtrays have been removed, and a handful of signs now state that smoking is permitted only in designated smoking areas, as per city law.
Still, the only directive for reporting violations is to call the state agency, which has delegated enforcement of their law to the counties and which has nothing whatsoever to do with violations of the city code.
While fewer smokers line the sidewalks than before, there is a dissident faction that refuses to allow diminution of "their rights" and disrupts regulatory efforts to show their disregard for the security force.
Impact of the state law has, therefore, been mixed.
Do all businesses have to post the sign that I’ve seen appear at the entrances of businesses? If so why? I don’t recall ever being able to smoke inside grocery stores (another place I have seen the sign) and they don’t inform the reader of much of anything (they do not note the 20 foot rule).
