Council Snuffs Out Talk of Apartment Smoking Ban

Elk Grove apartment-dwellers are free to keep puffing away, after the City Council decided Wednesday not to take action on .

Council members were considering a raft of options, including banning residents from lighting up in common areas and even inside their units. But they chose instead to focus on negotiating with the owners of one senior housing complex where residents had lodged a number of complaints.

"Your problem's very serious and I want to solve it," Councilmember Gary Davis told senior citizens from the affordable-housing community at Wednesday's council meeting. "I'm not sure a citywide policy is the solution."

The decision followed a number of pleas from Renwick residents for the city to intervene to protect them from neighbors' secondhand smoke.

Darlene Frazier said she has a brain tumor and moved from San Francisco to Elk Grove to escape the smokers that hung out near her old apartment.

"[Now] my neighbor smokes on her porch all the time," she said. "I'm on Section 8. I can't just get up and move anywhere. I don't have the money."

Other seniors who do not live at Renwick also testified in support of regulation, along with representatives of the Sacramento County Health Department and the Sacramento County Tobacco Control Coalition.

"Eighty-seven percent of Californians do not smoke, so when we're talking about the rights of smokers, we also have to think about the rights of the other 87 percent," said county public health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye. "There is no safe level" of secondhand smoke.

But Cory Koehler of the Rental Housing Association of Sacramento Valley, which represents property owners including Renwick, argued that negotiation and incentives could convince landlords to ban smoking on their own, without city intervention.

"If you go to these managers and explain to them they can reduce their turnover costs, it extends the life of their appliances, once you begin to talk to them about that they understand that," he said.

Council members seemed to side with Koehler, saying they were reluctant to intervene in the private decisions of renters and property owners.

"Once a mandate is put out there, it’s telling people that government is intruding on their rights and we can’t go there," said Councilmember Sophia Scherman. "I don’t want someone to come in my home and tell me I can’t smoke there," she said, adding that she is not actually a smoker.

Both council members and Koehler pledged to meet with Renwick management and come up with a solution to reduce smoking at the complex.

Some residents said they weren't satisfied with that outcome and were considering taking their own actions, including protests at the complex.

"Property owners and managers are more concerned about filling the buildings to capacity than actually caring about the residents' health who live in those buildings," said Renwick resident Linda Valles. "It is mind-boggling to me that in 2012 I am standing here tonight lobbying for the right to breathe fresh air in my apartment."

Elk Grove would have joined several dozen California cities and counties that already regulate smoking in apartment complexes.