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Excerpts from: Smoking ban OK’d on city-owned land

By  Stuart Sudak Eden Prairie News [10/16/02]

The Eden Prairie City Council Tuesday night tentatively approved an ordinance regulating smoking on city-owned property. According to the ordinance, smoking will be prohibited in city parks, facilities and parking lots. It prohibits people from lighting up in cars parked on city property, and inside vehicles owned or operated by the city when occupied by two or more people.

However, the ordinance will not prohibit smoking on city streets, easements, sidewalks, and most trails (except trails near or within parks).

The ordinance would go into effect Jan. 1, 2003.

For nearly an hour, council members wrangled over the language and the parameters of the law. In the end, they made just a couple minor changes to the ordinance drafted by city staff from council comments at a meeting two weeks ago.

Council member Ron Case urged his colleagues to keep the ordinance as strong as possible. That is essential if the city is going to be successful in its attempts to garner voluntary compliance for smoke-free restrictions from businesses, he said.

Also approved Tuesday was a resolution urging the state Legislature to enact a statewide law banning smoking in workplaces.

"This to me is just watered down nothing if we begin to pick apart at what we are in control of," Case said. "I believe we want this as a symbol. We must model what we are going to ask."

Indeed, the second step of the city’s smoke-free efforts is setting up a community indoor air quality task force that would study the issue. It would make recommendations on ways secondhand smoke in restaurants and other businesses can be eased through voluntary and promotional means.

The council agreed at its Oct. 1 meeting not to regulate smoking in restaurants or other businesses.

Members spent Tuesday’s workshop mulling the task force. A city memo stated membership would consist of "community stakeholders" such as restaurant owners, residents, anti-tobacco advocates, and business officials.

The task force would begin meeting in January. Its final report would be submitted to the council in 2003.

Since the issue has a way of polarizing people, council members suggested a "consensus" facilitator oversee meetings. It was made clear the group’s impetus would be problem solving not squabbling over an issue the council and the community have already debated for six months.

"See what we can do voluntarily to better the health of our people and improve air quality," Case said of the task force’s goal.

However, Jean Forster, president of the Minnesota Smoke-Free Coalition, later expressed the group’s disappointment with the council’s decision to forego a mandatory smoke-free ordinance. She urged the council to abandon its quest for a task force to promote what she called "so-called voluntary policies."

"The solution to protecting workers and families is simple: a smoke-free workplace ordinance," she stated. "Economic studies based on data, not opinion, show such policies do not hurt business. If the council is not willing to take steps to protect the health of its citizens, it should acknowledge that. We discourage the council from symbolic gestures that do not protect public health in any meaningful way."

Case voiced frustration with Forster’s comments. He said the council would continue to work toward a smoke-free Eden Prairie.

"We need your support, not your chastisement," he said.

Council member David Luse also posed a possibility called Forward Eden Prairie. The aim of the non-profit group would be to celebrate the city for "all the great things it is."

Sioux Falls, S.D., has a similar program.

He said the group would attempt to raise $1 million. That money would fund ways to promote the city as a great place to live, a great place to do business, and for smoke-free incentives.

Other council members liked the idea. They theorized the group could help fund voluntary compliance incentives long-term.

"Stay tuned," Luse said.