Oceanside Could Ban Smoking at Parks, Beaches

By Chris Tribbey, North County Times, Escondido, Calif.

Mar. 10–OCEANSIDE — By summer, Oceanside could be the third city in the county to ban smoking at public beaches, and Councilwoman Shari Mackin said Thursday she wants to take it a step further by keeping smokers from lighting up at the city’s parks as well.

The city’s Parks and Recreation Commission voted Thursday night to establish a six-person committee to study a potential ban at all public beaches, as well as public parks, the Municipal Pier and the Pier Amphitheater. If the committee backs Mackin’s idea, and if it wins council approval, the city would join Solana Beach and Del Mar as the only other cities in San Diego County to ban smoking at public beaches.

Mackin said she got the idea for the ban during a lobbying trip last month to Washington, D.C.

“I couldn’t believe they still smoked in hotels and restaurants (in Washington, D.C.),” she said. “I felt like a shut-in.”

She said that Oceanside’s parks and beaches are family-oriented and that smokers are a clear minority in those areas.

Statistics from the Vista Community Clinic’s Tobacco Control Program appear to back her up. Clinic volunteers conducted surveys at Oceanside beaches during the last six months of 2005, interviewing hundreds of residents and visitors about their attitudes toward smoking at the beach. Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed were nonsmokers, and 80 percent of those surveyed said they would be in favor of smoke-free beaches, according to Jean Feeney, program manager for the Tobacco Control Program.

She said that while two-thirds of respondents pointed to second-hand smoke as a big problem, 85 percent said that litter caused by smokers in the form of cigarette butts was the main complaint.

“It takes 10, 15 years for them to breakdown,” Feeney said. “They pollute the ground and get into the ocean.”

At the beach just south of the pier Thursday, clinic members displayed more than 18,000 cigarette butts they had collected during local beach cleanups late last year.

Feeney said her group is sensitive to the opinions of local smokers, especially Marines who smoke at Oceanside’s beaches.

“We’re not telling them to stop smoking,” she said. “We’re saying they should stop smoking at the beach. The feedback we get from smokers says we’re taking away their rights. And (the cities) say it’s impossible to enforce.”

She said signs alerting people to the smoke-free state of beaches, ashtray cans at beach entrances, and self-enforcement by smokers would be needed should Oceanside approve such a ban.

“We’re going to see what the public will is,” Feeney said. “This is moving much sooner than we expected.”

Laurence Hannaford, a 39-year-old Oceanside resident, beachgoer and regular smoker, said a ban on smoking at the beach wouldn’t affect him much, though he said it would be impossible to enforce.

“The government gets in our business way too much anyway,” he said. “It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”

According to the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, Americans improperly dispose of 175 million pounds of cigarette butts each year, and many of those butts make their way to the ocean via storm drains. Just under 20 communities in California have passed local ordinances banning smoking at beaches since Solana Beach first did it in 2003.

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