Group wants no smoking at beaches

Deirdre Newman

A Costa Mesa group wants coastal cities such as Huntington Beach to

ban smoking on beaches so there won’t be so many cigarette butts

littering the sands.

The 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 secondhand smoke.

Huntington Beach Councilwoman Debbie Cook said an effort such as

this would need to be embraced by the community first.

“Bureaucrats -- they really need the people of the community to

generate the interest on this,” Cook said. “We can’t impose this on

people. They have to have a desire to have this themselves.”

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 cigarette butts on the beach and put them

in their mouths. The butts are 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 heard anything back, Barger

said.

Councilman Steve 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 cause 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 a ban on smoking at

the beach would be much more difficult to enforce than in bars and

restaurants because 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 saw the educational signs that

would be posted throughout the beach areas. The ban would only affect

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 that putting them in a trash can might start a

fire, she said.

She hopes the volunteers who clean the beaches through the

foundation will be so disgusted by 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 for Times Community News and

may be reached at (949) 574-4221 or by e-mail at

deirdre.newman@latimes.com.