If you like to have a cigarette as you walk through Pioneer Park, or a pipe as you golf at Mountain Dell, you won't have to kick the habit just yet.
The Salt Lake City Council on Tuesday put off until next month a vote on an ordinance proposed by Mayor Rocky Anderson's office that would ban smoking in all city-owned outdoor places — parks, cemeteries, golf courses and the like. It would also prohibit smoking within 50 feet of large public gatherings taking place on public property.
While the idea — cutting down on exposure to secondhand smoke for people visiting Salt Lake's public places — had widespread support among the council, there were enough concerns about the specifics to prevent Tuesday's scheduled vote from taking place.
"I'm really struggling with this piece of legislation, not because I don't value the need to address the safety risks or concerns that may be real, but constitutionally, what are the grounds for having an ordinance like this?" Councilman Soren Simonsen said. "What is it that we are protecting that justifies having an ordinance that restricts one person's right?"
Beyond that, Simonsen said, the ordinance as proposed doesn't seem like enough to actually tackle the health risks.
"If it's the health risk that we're after, we have to address the health risk, not just pat ourselves on the back," he said.
He called the definition of a public gathering — any gathering of 500 or more people expected to last at least two hours — "arbitrary" and wondered why the ordinance doesn't include places where people are more regularly in close quarters, bus stops and urban sidewalks among them.
"I understand your position," said Anderson's chief of staff, Sam Guevara. "I guess we're just trying to take it step by step."
Other council members agreed with Guevara, saying the city may need to start with a less all-encompassing ordinance, which they see as setting the stage for a change in the public's way of thinking.
Toward that change in thinking, Councilwoman Nancy Saxton suggested the final ordinance might be better if the proposed punishment for violating the ban is changed. Currently, the proposal would allow a fine of up to $299, but Saxton said a smaller, phased-in fine might be better.
The proposal received positive reviews from residents at Tuesday's public hearing, with a number of people — including several teenagers — asking the council to pass it.
Mike Ferguson, 18, of Teen Advocates Against Tobacco, showed the council a jar filled with 531 cigarette butts, collected at Liberty Park's children's play area in August. He said beside the health risk of secondhand smoke, public smoking sets a bad example for impressionable youths.
"By seeing smoking all around them, youth perceive that smoking is the normal thing to do," he said.
And Taylorsville High School student Patrick Chase, 17, himself a former smoker, said the public places addressed in the ordinance — especially parks and ball fields — were exactly the places he and his friends used to go to smoke.
"Just because we have this choice to smoke does not mean we need to spread it to the children, to the people around us," he said.
When the ordinance comes back for a vote in November, there likely will be discussion of any number of amendments. Among the ideas council members expressed interest in Tuesday are extending the ban to a wider range of areas and clarifying the ordinance's enforcement.
Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank, in a statement reported by the council's staff, said the ordinance would be "challenging" for police to enforce. He predicted police would respond only when they saw someone smoking in a banned area and that calls from residents reporting violations could "overwhelm our dispatch center."
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