Group wants no smoking at beaches
Deirdre Newman
A Costa Mesa group wants coastal cities like Newport Beach to ban
smoking on beaches to crack down on cigarette butts littering the
sands.
Earth Resource Foundation wants cities to create laws against
smoking at the beach. Its main concern is litter, but foundation
officials are also concerned about the effects of second-hand smoke.
While Newport Beach officials laud the efforts, they say it will
be extremely difficult to enforce.
“How in the world would you enforce that?” asked Councilman Steve
Bromberg. “You would have to give lifeguards police power and that’s
not something I would be inclined to support.”
The foundation started surveying people around the pier in
Huntington Beach last March and found a majority of respondents
favored smoke-free areas at the beach and the surrounding area, said
Stephanie Barger, executive director and founder of the group.
On World No Tobacco Day, an international event in May, foundation
volunteers scoured the beach at the Huntington Beach Pier for
cigarettes and picked up hundreds of them, Barger said.
“There were a lot of high school students that participated and
were completely disgusted,” she said.
The main problem with cigarettes is litter, Barger said. Children
have been known to pick up butts on the beach and put them in their
mouths. They are also consumed by fish sometimes, she said.
The foundation wants to eliminate the pollution caused by smokers
at the beach.
“If someone has a really bad case of asthma, they can’t go on a
pier where someone is smoking,” Barger said.
In November, the foundation brought 10,000 cigarette butts to a
Newport Beach City Council meeting and requested a study session
discussion on the topic. They haven’t head anything back, Barger
said.
Bromberg said he has investigated some of the cities that do have
a ban on smoking at the beach and found, in some cases, it could
instigate problems among beachgoers.
“If someone plops their blanket down and pulls out a cigarette and
the person next to them starts screaming, the lifeguards have to do
something,” Bromberg said. “I know there have been some fistfights
over that and then the cops show up.”
Newport Beach Police Chief Bob McDonell said enforcing a ban on
smoking at the beach would be much more difficult to enforce than in
bars and restaurants since beach areas are more expansive.
The hope is that if city officials can be convinced to pass a law,
smokers would readily comply once they see the educational signs that
would be posted throughout the beach areas. It only affects a small
percentage of the population, since only 16% of people in Orange
County smoke, she said.
“A lot of smokers already think you can’t smoke on the beaches,”
Barger said. “It’s not like this is some completely new phenomenon.”
Barger also wants to educate beachgoers that cigarette butts are
not biodegradable and have more than 150 chemicals in them. She is
encouraging cites to provide appropriate receptacles for butts, since
some people are afraid to put them in trash cans for fear of starting
a fire, she said.
She hopes the volunteers who clean the beaches through the
foundation will be so disgusted with the amount of cigarette butts
they find that they will spread word of the problem and rally at
council meetings to persuade city officials to take some action.
* DEIRDRE NEWMAN covers Costa Mesa and may be reached at (949)
574-4221 or by e-mail at deirdre.newman@latimes.com.
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.