Pearland Update
Pearland to decide on stronger smoking ban
October 21, 2007
Nathaniel Lukefahr
Nathaniel Lukefahr
PEARLAND — After learning about the effects of second-hand smoke in March, a group of Sablatura Middle School sixth-grade students worked hard to make a difference. And now, the proposed no-smoking ordinance they wrote is on the ballot in Pearland.
“It was amazing what they did,” Pearland ISD Director of Communications Renee Ivy-Sims said.
The proposed ordinance states there can be no smoking inside buildings and smokers must stand at least 25 feet away from building entrances while they are smoking, Pearland City Manager Bill Eisen said.
The city has a no-smoking ordinance in place, but it allows smoking inside restaurants that identify an area as a smoking section, and there must be a barrier between it and the no-smoking section.
The 22 students, most of them 12 years old, approached council at a meeting in March after Councilmen Kevin Cole talked to them in January about how they can make city government work for them, said David Bean, the students’ science teacher.
Bean helped them write the ordinance by looking at other ordinances from around the state. He and the students chose what they wanted in the ordinance before they hit the pavement to hear what residents had to say.
“We collected many different ones and they told me which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t like,” Bean said.
From January to March, the students went door-to-door, gathering almost 500 signatures on a petition to get smoking out of public places, Bean said. They needed 343 to get the proposed ordinance on the ballot.
“The students came to council and we listened,” Eisen said. “The whole point is so the public can tell us what they want us to do. And we are content to do what the public wants to do.”
But resident Early Scales does not think banning smoking indoors is a good idea. Scales, a non-smoker, said forcing people to smoke only in their home or outside is punishing them.
“They’d be taking too much away from them,” he said. “I don’t smoke, but I’d vote against it.”
Scales said many people view smoking as an addiction, so people should not be punished for something that is not easy to kick.
But Pearland resident Cynthia Smith said she will vote for the ordinance because she does not like to be around smoking.
“I don’t like the smell of smoke and I don’t want to smell it,” she said. “I think every city should have an ordinance not allowing smoking.”
Early voting begins Monday and Election Day is Nov. 6.
Nathaniel Lukefahr is a reporter for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 849-8581.
