The Butt-Heads At City Hall
Shall I issue my usual disclaimers and disclosures up front this time? There are smokers who are assholes about their smoking. However, I am not one of them. I don’t smoke around children, I don’t smoke at or near bus shelters, I don’t complain about cigarette taxes, and I don’t litter when I’m done smoking, to the extent that I’ll often end up carrying around cigarette butts until I find a proper trash can. And I’ve been known to hurl invective at those smokers who do otherwise.
But it’s once again time to check in with what the butt-obsessed officials down at City Hall are doing these days. As it turns out, Randy Leonard wants to amend Dan Saltzman’s already-crazy expansion of no-nos for the city’s parks to include a total ban on smoking within them.
(I’ll set aside his intended exemption for the municipally-owned golf courses, since Randy asserts that he was never especially comfortable with it and now is reconsidering it.)
Normally when we’re discussing the issue of anti-smoking laws in Portland, it’s in the context of potential attempts to ban smoking in bars (and normally the debate is wrapped in public policy irrelevancies such as non-smokers claiming the right to patronize any bar they want without having to deal with smoke), although as I understand it, that first requires a change in state law, and I don’t recall at the moment whether or not the legislature actually has yet made that change.
But the recent imposition of a smoking ban in Pioneer Courthouse Square added to the common theme amongst many of the laws adopted by City Council over the years which apply only or mainly to downtown, including various constitutionally-suspect exclusions laws and de facto sit-lie ordinances. That common theme? Targeting young people and other undesirables, regardless of whether or not it can be demonstrated that this was the overt intent of City Council.
(Tangentially, when Pioneer Courthouse Square itself was first proposed and planned, downtown businesses and other powerful interests attempted to quash the idea of an open space, pushing instead for an enclosed area, out of a fear that the Square — you guessed it — would attract undesirables. To a certain extent, the same attitude could be detected when the board which operates the Square tried to install a massive covered ice skating rink which would have dominated the Square for one-third of the year, and serverely curtailed and restricted any other use of the space.)
Now the push is on to extend the Square’s ban on smoking to include all areas of all city parks, an expansion beyond an earlier proposal just to ban smoking near (for example) play areas which predominantly are used by children — a narrower restriction which in fact doesn’t bother me.
The ultimate end-game of all of this should be fairly clear: Once they’ve imposed the trifecta of bans on the transit mall, the Square, and all city parks, they’ll push to expand it to all public sidewalks, pitching it as just a minor tweak to the restrictions already adopted. Suddenly, you can only smoke at home.
Except, of course, if you’re an apartment-dweller and your landlord or property management company forbids it. So, only homeowners would have anywhere at all in which they could smoke.
Of course smoking is an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. Of course it’s regarded by a vast array of non-smokers as a rank and foul behavior. And there is no all-encompassing or inalienable right to smoke wherever or however one chooses. But is the slow crawl towards a complete ban on smoking in public areas even close to being a proper public policy response?
Pretty soon, the only place you’ll be able to see butts in public is sitting behind the dais at the front of Council Chambers.