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.