The smoking ban.html passed by City Council last year has apparently done very little to improve the score that prompted the ban in the first place. The American Lung Association still gave the city a “D” in its annual Tobacco Report Card, the Sentinel reports. The wording of the current ordinance isn’t strong enough, says Paul Knepprath, Vice President of the ALA for Advocacy and Health Initiatives. He is upset that the ordinance does not make specific mention of secondhand tobacco smoke and that there are still designated smoking areas in public.
The irony is that the ban was prompted by another D grade, that one in 2008. Despite the new ordinance, the grade has not improved. “This is ridiculous,” Mayor Mike Rotkin wrote in a letter to the ALA, “and, frankly, it does not motivate me to press my City Council colleagues to take further action to reduce smoking: quite the reverse.”
“Frankly, it makes me so angry I don’t ever want to talk to these people again,” he told the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
