What to do about tobacco smoke drifting from condominium to condominium, apartment to apartment?
The Utah Department of Health is recommending the state require condo associations and apartment building owners to designate their structures as non-smoking or smoking.Last June, the Legislature's Health and Environment Interim Committee asked the Department of Health to work on solutions to the problem of secondhand smoke in multiunit dwellings.
A department working group decided that having non-smoking and smoking buildings was the best of 10 options. It presented its findings to the committee last week, recommending the percentage of smoke-free buildings equal the percentage of Utah families with no smoking members.
Chris Ogden, business manager of Foxcreek Apartments in Layton, said requiring separate buildings would hurt the industry. If the non-smoking building is full and the smoking building is empty, potential renters who don't smoke would have to be turned away.
"It limits the rent potential," Ogden said.
For one longtime resident, Foxcreek installed an ionizer in the nonsmoker's apartment to clean the air. Indeed, one option discussed last summer was to require smokers to install equipment to clean the air of their tobacco smoke.
The issue initially was identified as a problem by Senate President Lane Beattie, but the West Bountiful Republican has since abandoned sponsoring any bill.
Sen. Robert Montgomery, R-North Ogden, said he may sponsor the bill and is confident it will be discussed in the 1997 Legislature. Montgomery is chairman of the Health and Environment Interim Committee.
He said that although laws shield neighbors from other neighbors' nuisances, nonsmokers in multiunit dwellings are vulnerable.
Carolyn Bean counts herself among those. She and her husband told the committee last summer they moved into a new condominium in Bountiful six years ago. But two years ago, three smokers moved into the condo beneath theirs.
Despite expensive efforts to seal and aerate their home against the drifting smoke, Bean said she and her husband smell like smoke, people think they smoke, and they are experiencing health problems like mucus congestion, headaches, sore throats and swollen eyes.
Celia Burrows, who served on the work group, said the person who lives beneath her smokes and therefore "makes the decision for me that I am going to smoke."
Montgomery has said he supports legislation that would help people stop smoking and at the same time preserve their right to smoke so long as it doesn't interfere with others who don't.