City to decide on beach smoking ban

Andrew Edwards

Laguna Beach moved one step closer Tuesday to joining a growing

number of coastal cities aiming to stamp out smoking on the beaches.

The City Council gave preliminary approval to an ordinance that

would prohibit smoking at city beaches with a 4-0 vote, Councilman

Steve Dicterow was absent. The council ordered city staffers to draw

up detailed plans to install no smoking signs and ashcans by the time

the ordinance will be up for final approval.

Final approval could come as early as the first City Council

meeting in October, City Manager Ken Frank said.

If passed, the new ordinance is expected to go into effect on July

1, 2005. If the law is passed, smokers could face a $100 fine if

caught lighting up on the beach, Frank said.

However, officials emphasized the point of the new law is not to

write tickets, but to simply keep the beaches smoke free.

Citations will be intended as a last resort in case a smoker

ignores instructions from a lifeguard or police officer to snuff out

their cigarette.

“I can’t imagine that happening,” Frank said.

Councilwomen Elizabeth Pearson and Toni Iseman have both backed

council action to put an end to smoking on the beaches. Both have

said that too many cigarettes end up discarded on the beach.

“Cigarette butts are a big pollutant of the ocean, and it takes

over 10 years for a cigarette butt to dissolve and disappear,” she

said.

Both Pearson and Iseman liked that the proposed ordinance would

seek smokers’ cooperation rather than hit them with fines.

“I am not very high on giving citations,” Pearson said. “It’s very

low-key, which is exactly what I wanted.”

Citations may not even be practical on the beach, Iseman said,

since many beachgoers wouldn’t carry identification along with their

swimsuits. She said she wants to focus on posting notices that remind

beachgoers not to puff away.

“I hope that we do follow through with the signage that says the

beaches are smoke-free zones,” she said.

A couple of smokers found at Main Beach on Wednesday said they

could live with a smoking ban in order to keep the surf clean.

“I care about the ocean and I stick my butts in the sand and it’s

absurd,” smoker Mike Kuester admitted. “It probably should be

stopped.”

If unable to smoke on the beach, smoker Morgan Ryan would simply

light up somewhere else, she said. A ban would not be a major

inconvenience for her.

“It wouldn’t really matter to me,” she said. “If that’s the way it

was, that’s the way it was.”

The Newport Beach City Council banned smoking on beaches in that

city on Tuesday.

In Orange County, the trend was started by a ban in San Clemente,

and smoking on the beaches was also recently banned Huntington Beach.