Get Your Butts Out of Our Public Parks, NOW!

This Wednesday, Feb. 11, at 3:15 p.m., Portland City Parks Commissioner Amanda Fritz will introduce an ordinance to impose a smoking ban and tobacco-free policy in all city parks, recreation areas, and any other places where the Portland Parks & Recreation Bureau has jurisdiction. I plan to be there to observe and, I hope, testify in support.

The ban has been brewing for a while. The proposal surfaced last May, and the Oregonian editorial page came out in opposition. I sent a lengthy letter to the editor in response, which the paper put on its website and in the print edition as a “guest commentary” with a rebuttal from the editor. This is a rare occurrence, so as I observed on this blog, I must have hit the guy where he lives.

In preparation for this month’s formal proposal by Fritz, her office invited public comment in January. Here the letter I emailed to her assistant:

I am voicing my strong support for the proposed smoking ban in Portland parks.

My wife and I have lived at Museum Place, 1030 SW Jefferson, for nearly a decade. We patronize the symphony, the art museum, the PSU farmers market, and other facilities and events along and within the South Park Blocks on a regular basis. We walk our dog (and pick up after her) every day there.

We belong to the Friends of South Park Blocks, and as volunteers over the past three years have collected trash (which invariably includes hundreds of cigarette butts), weeded, mulched, and deadheaded the rose beds between the art museum and the historical society, and raised financing for and planted new plants along the Lincoln block between SW Madison and Main.

In addition, I work part-time for the Portland Streetcar as a customer service rep, and lead Portland Walking Tours every week. The latter bring visitors to Portland from all over the nation and indeed the world, and the tour route traverses two blocks of the South Park Blocks -- as well as Chapman Square, Lownsdale Square, and Tom McCall Waterfront Park, where my guests see some of the same problems that give our city a black eye.

We need a smoking ban because the South Park Blocks have become dangerous to citizens and an eyesore. Drug dealers hang out nearly all day, every day, on the Shemanski Park block between SW Salmon and Main. Skateboarders brazenly leap on the “Peace Chant” sculpture at all hours of the day, despite signage that bans skateboards in the park blocks entirely and in particular in Peace Chant Square. Vagrants eat, sleep, beg, and even defecate (as well as allow their dogs to do so) on the park blocks, despite the presence of a Portland Loo on SW Columbia.

Many of these people smoke. No doubt many of them dump their cigarette butts on the grass, walks, and street, rather than use the plentiful trash barrels. But not only they do it; I see respectable-looking passersby and residents of the adjacent apartments and condos dump their cigarettes on the streets and in the park as well. Smokers of all walks of life seem to assume littering laws do not apply to them.

All of this has contributed to a general degradation of the neighborhood. At present, neither the Park Rangers, Portland Clean and Safe, the private Pacific Patrol officers, nor Portland Police have any enforcement power over this noisome problem. Nor, I would agree, should they, if we were speaking of smoking in and of itself. Littering and second-hand smoke inarguably pale in comparison to the car break-ins, public drunkenness, and violent crimes that occur in the downtown core.

But a smoking ban would give authorities more leverage over the people who tend to commit these crimes, and would, I hope, raise the level of patrolling in the park areas where trouble often occurs. This would be a great thing, given the considerable tourist traffic, not to mention the regular crowds of children who flow through the South Park Blocks on visits to the Art Museum, the Historical Society, and productions of the Oregon Children's Theater in the performing arts center.

The examples of the bans in Pioneer Courthouse Square and Director Park should indicate the advantages to be enjoyed. People love to spend time in those spaces, and the same should be true of the parks. I have repeatedly had confrontations with skateboarders at the Peace Chant statue, many of whom have grown increasingly belligerent because they know the authorities won’t show up in time to throw them out or impose sanctions. I don't dare confront the drug dealers, vagrants, or crazy people who wander the park.

It feels like a war, and many of us are feeling like giving up. Starting with the Downtown Plan in the early 1970s, the city did wonderful things to battle suburban flight and attract citizens back into the downtown core to live. But too often, the council seems unaware that 12,000 of us live in the downtown area, pay taxes, contribute to the life of the city, and yet have to battle the litter, abuse, trash, cigarette butts, excrement, and daily begging of people the city can’t or won’t do anything about.

You’re losing us, in spirit and, more and more likely, in body as well.

Please pass the parks smoking ban.

Although the Oregonian editorialist attacked the proposed ordinance again last December on the basis of freedom of choice for smokers as well as the need to “keep Portland weird,” a pair of current or recent Portland Parks board members fired back. And across the rest of the country, change is looking inevitable.

Nearly 500 U.S. cities, counties, and towns have already banned smoking in public parks. It’s probably no surprise that Salt Lake City is one of them. San Francisco enacted a ban ’way back in 2004 that’s still one of the strictest in the country.

Chicago banned smoking on public playgrounds and beaches (including 26 miles of Lake Michigan lakefront) in 2007. In the same year, the mayor of Albuquerque enacted a ban by executive order, and though the city council opposed the order and called it “unenforceable,” it remains in effect.

Los Angeles County passed its smoking ban in 2009. The only exceptions are actors on films sets and in theatrical productions, and then only in consultation with a fire official and at the discretion of the parks director.

In addition, our namesake city, Portland, Maine, passed a ban on smoking in public parks two years ago. Perhaps the greatest sign of changing times, however, occurred last year when CVS, the largest drugstore chain in the country in terms of sales, decided it would discontinue selling tobacco products.

Whether in acknowledgement that it’s kind of hypocritical for a pharmacy and health-care products retailer to sell addictive drugs that damage the respiratory tract, or just a corporate response to what appears to be an ever-dwindling market, that’s a heartening development.