Brunswick County says NO.
Brunswick County rejects smoking ban on its land
June 9, 2010
By Steve Jones – sjones@thesunnews. com
BOLIVIA, N.C. — Brunswick County commissioners have rejected a proposal to make all county property tobacco-free and to set up designated smoking areas at county parks.
Commissioner Scott Phillips said he was originally in favor of the ban, but voted against it Monday night because of his personal observations of smokers’ self-imposed protocol at parks and because he thinks it best to stick with the board’s vision of “less government and [staying] out of people’s lives.”
Instead, he and three other commissioners authorized county department heads to designate informal smoking areas at the county government complex and to leave the parks as they are. Phillips said that he recently has been at ball games in Brunswick County parks from Waccamaw to Leland and observed smokers removing themselves from bleachers and other areas where fans congregate to smoke as unobtrusively as possible.
He questioned a number of them, he said, and found that they either put their butts in their pockets or in soft drink cans.
Commissioner Charles Warren cast the sole vote in favor of the tobacco-free proposal.
“No one has come up to say they’d like to see a ban,” said Phillips, a fact noted by other commissioners who voted against the ban.
Commissioner Phil Norris said he could go either way on the ban but, like other board members, doesn’t want the county to spend any money on designated smoking areas. County staff estimated that it would cost about $35,000 to build a smoking gazebo at the county complex and an estimated $12,000 for signs and butt cans at parks.
Bill Sue, commissioners chairman, worried about the health costs of smoking, but recalled the anger of his father-in-law when the government mandated seat belt use in vehicles.
“If it gets to be a problem and nonsmokers come up here and complain, that’s a different issue,” Sue said.
Commissioner Marty Cooke agreed that designated smoking areas at the county complex should be set up without the use of tax money. He said that if a ban were to be instituted, it should not be imposed for 18 to 24 months after an ordinance was approved.
The vote was no doubt greeted with relief from Lamar Harris and Ed Carter, two county employees who spoke against the ban at a public hearing prior to the board’s vote.
Carter, a Sheriff’s Office detective, said the ban would be unenforceable. He said the Sheriff’s Office has a designated smoking area between two buildings.
Harris said she understands that nonsmokers have a right not to be harassed by other people’s smoke, but added that smokers have rights, too.
“I know that smoking is not healthy,” she said, “but you can say the same thing about overeating and obesity.”
The Second-Hand Smoke Charade
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5811
Quote: It now turns out that the influential 1993 EPA report “Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders” was as phony as a three-dollar bill. State officials and private businesses that believed that ETS was a public health danger (and not just a nuisance) were completely misled by the EPA. And, of course, so was main street American public opinion.?
