Technology Succeeds Where Anti-Smoking Crusaders Sought To Tread
Posted by: Jubal | 06/05/2007 5:05 PM
Last October I participated in my first OC Harbors, Beaches and Parks Commission meeting as the Third District Commissioner. The big item on the agenda was a proposal to ban smoking on county beaches, which then-Supervisor Tom Wilson was pushing to have enacted before being term-limited off the board.
I went down fighting as my fellow commissioners voted 4-3 to recommend approval of the ban. The Board of Supervisors showed better sense and squashed the ban.
While a gave little weight to the barrel of scare statistics about second-hand smoke and chemicals, I thought proponents had a legitimate point in wanting to avoid state sanctions for doing an insufficiently good job of cleaning county beaches of litter. The county's beach cleaning machine was able to strain the cigarette butts out of the sand and since butts accounted for a significant portion of beach litter, the proposed solution of government SOP: ban smoking!
My thought at the time, which I expressed at the meeting, was we should look at a technical solution to the problem than automatically shrinking our sphere of liberty a little bit more. After all, if we can pout a man on the Moon, surely we can build a beach cleaner that can remove cigarette butts from the sand.
Lo and behold, the County of Orange has purchased the BeachTech 2800 and deployed it to clean Sunset Beach, as reported last week in the OC Register. I'm told the HBP budget being developed will include funding for additional Beach Tech 2800s to clean other county beaches.
What I find curious is that according to the article, purchase of this machine has been in the pipeline since June 2006, when then-Sup. Jim Silva signed off on buying the BeachTech 2800 -- but that information was never provided to HBP Commissioners last year. We were given lots of scary statistics about fish swallowing butts and nasty chemicals leaching into the groundwater that doesn't exist below county beaches in order to alarm us into recommending a smoking ban, but were never presented with information about a technical solution to the litter problem like buying a few BeachTech 2800s.
UPDATE (6/6/07): I should clarify in the interests of fairness that the proposal for banning smoking on county beaches came from the county Health Care Agency, not the Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department.
Mr. Ayer registered as a Republican to be electable in an interim election with no incumbents. He did...
Most butts on beaches get there from urban runoff. When people were stopped from smoking in bars they went to the curb, dropped their butts in the gutter--and the law of unintended consequences did the rest. Best way to clean up beaches, provide public ashtrays at local night spots.
How about the little bugs discard their trash in the trash can? I'm not sure about the unintended consequences theory that says smokers moved to the curb area because where I live I always get butts at my curn area and as far as I now I don't think my smocking-neighbor down the street did some self imposed ban on smoking at his house. He's just a litter bug!
@Bob Roberts: Don't do crack. It's a ghetto drug.
So the solution to the smokers' shrinking-sphere-of-liberty problem was to shrink everyone else's sphere just a little bit more by spending our tax dollars on a fleet of shiny new giant beach-cleaning machines? I sure hope that there was more behind this purchase than the new machines' adroitness in dealing with cigarette butts ...