A recent cigarette-butt cleanup at four Santa Maria parks obviously helped remove unsightly litter. On a more subtle level, however, it added weight to a continuing effort to pass an anti-tobacco ordinance in city parks, which has been smoldering since late summer.
The Santa Barbara County Public Health Department and local community groups coordinated the cleanup with money from the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The Kiwanis Key Clubs at Pioneer and Santa Maria high schools, the American Lung Association of California, the Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department, and the Council on Drug Abuse and Alcoholism all helped with the efforts.
Trina Long, health educator for the Santa Barbara County Tobacco Prevention Program, helped coordinate the cleanup and plans to keep doing so “as long as we have money.” Most of her funding comes from the settlement.
Long explained that her work encompasses a wide range of duties, including education, arts (in the form of anti-tobacco murals at local schools), policy work, undercover buys that ensure retailers aren’t selling to minors, and environmental work like the recent cleanup.
Part of the initial cleanup process involved volunteers surveying parks to determine which ones would be part of the effort.
“We wanted to sample the areas where people tended to congregate and smoke,” Long said, adding that areas surveyed included picnic areas, sporting sites, and playgrounds.
After selecting the locations, groups made up of an adult and four or five youths from the Girl Scouts and Kiwanis made an initial clean sweep, then asked city staffers not to pick up cigarette butts in the area for a week.
“We wanted to make sure we weren’t picking up butts that were a year old,” Long said.
The number of butts collected was used to support the Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department’s ongoing efforts to pass an anti-tobacco ordinance for city parks.
Alexander Posada, the city’s director of Recreation and Parks, said the commission has received a lot of positive feedback on the issue.
“Even the smokers who spoke at our hearings didn’t really speak in opposition,” he said. “It was more to say that a designated [smoking] area would be okay.”
Posada explained that the Recreation and Parks Commission plans to present the tobacco-free ordinance to the City Council during the second meeting in January, at which point the council will hold public hearings.
Both Posada and Long made it clear that the ordinance would be mostly self policing and, according to Long, “not a priority for law enforcement.”
Posada sees it as a complaint-driven kind of issue.
“In dealing with 28 different parks in town, as complaints come in, we’ll post those parks as designated smoking areas,” he said. “If there are no complaints, we won’t post those parks.”
Part of the reason for proceeding on a park-by-park basis is the cost involved: Posada expects the tally to run $2,000 to $3,000 per designated smoking area. The costs include posting signs at each major entrance, an enclosed ashtray “so kids don’t pick out butts,” and a seat or bench for smokers’ comfort.
A roughly five-acre park site-Posada used Atkinson as an example-would get two designated areas. With larger parks, such as the 40-acre Preisker, a different kind of setup would keep smokers away from general assembly areas.
“Obviously, we wouldn’t put eight areas in there,” Posada said.
More than 120 communities in California have some type of outdoor smoking restriction in their parks-whether banned outright or designated smoking areas-and Long sees it as a trend for the state.
“Pismo and Morro Bay have smoke-free parks, and most of the local beaches in all of L.A. and Orange County are smoke free,” she said, going on to list Carpinteria, Santa Barbara, Pismo, and Morro beaches as smoke free.
If tobacco-free ordinances pass for local parks, Long hopes the next step will be addressing smoking in multi-unit housing complexes.
“We’ve had housing communities coming to the county asking what they can do,” she said. “These are complexes where there are shared walls and ducts, and people are getting secondhand smoke in their homes.”
According to a county press release, cigarette butts are “unsightly, toxic, take many years to biodegrade, and use costly resources for their removal.”
Long said she’s frustrated by the sight of cigarette butt litter, and doesn’t understand why smokers don’t see it the same way: “You wouldn’t find your average smoker throwing a Starbucks cup out the window of their car, but they do the same thing with their cigarette butts.” m
Contact intern Nicholas Walter at intern@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 4-11, 2008.