Students ask city to ban beach smoking

Alicia Robinson

A group of students who want nonsmoking beaches and piers are

demanding that Newport Beach take notice, and the City Council

responded Tuesday.

Hoping to draw attention to their cause, about 20 Newport Harbor

High School students held a press conference at the Newport Pier and

then proceeded en masse to the Newport Beach City Council meeting.

“We surf here,” said Tyler Wolk, a freshman in teacher Scott

Morlan’s surf class. “It’s appalling how dirty the beach gets and how

it smells. I mean, there’s so many cigarette butts.”

Councilmen Steve Rosansky and John Heffernan on Tuesday directed

city staff members to research the topic of banning smoking on the

city’s beaches.

“I’m in favor of this totally,” Heffernan said. “Quite frankly, it

should have been done last November ... I’d like our staff to take a

good, hard look at this.”

Students in Morlan’s class adopted the smoke-free beach initiative

as their class project. They and students in the Earth Resource

Foundation Club collected about 700 signatures on petitions for a

beach smoking ban, and they held a beach cleanup April 17.

“We know it’s a pain for smokers to have to give up smoking at the

beach, but it would make it a lot cleaner for everyone,” said

sophomore Earth club member Amy Thomas.

To encourage Newport Beach City Council members to ban smoking on

the city’s beaches and piers, local students on Tuesday brought two

long, clear plastic tubes filled with about 13,000 cigarette butts

from the cleanup effort.

Costa Mesa-based Earth Resource Foundation is also ratcheting up

the pressure on Newport Beach to go smoke-free in the wake of beach

smoking bans in Los Angeles, San Clemente, Solana Beach and a

preliminary approval of a ban in Santa Monica.

The foundation spearheaded a November beach cleanup followed by a

request that council members consider the issue. Newport Beach Mayor

Tod Ridgeway said earlier that council members can’t discuss any

issue unless it is presented at a study session or is placed on the

agenda, and no council member has presented the issue for discussion.

A ban on smoking would be tough to enforce and would require more

manpower than the city can devote to it, Ridgeway said.

San Clemente’s beach smoking ban cost that city less than $15,000

for the necessary signs and trash cans as well as enforcement, Earth

Resource Foundation Executive Director Stephanie Barger said.

The students’ press conference -- and the attendant media --

attracted the attention of passersby. Some stopped to sign a

petition, like Brenda Shine, who was out on her rollerblades. She

said she’d support a beach smoking ban.

“Absolutely,” she said. “No doubt. There’s no positive message

being sent by allowing [smoking].”

But unanimous support would be too much to expect. Huntington

Beach residents Mike Strickland and Eric Jensen said the beach is a

public place where people have the right to smoke, though they ought

to be more respectful about where they put their cigarette butts.

“If smokers had better habits it wouldn’t be such an issue,”

Jensen said.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

[email protected].