Carroll County?s commissioners and environmental advisers say they are focusing their energies elsewhere even as other municipalities continue to pass or push for smoking bans.
“Water and schools are more of a top priority than setting a smoking ban,” Commissioner Perry Jones Jr. said Wednesday.
Jones said he received e-mails from residents asking whether Carroll had any plans to ban smoking after Howard County passed the ban for restaurants and bars.
But the issue of whether the county should switch from
commissioner to a code home rule form of government is more important now, he said.
Commissioners do have the power to convene as the county health board to pass a smoking ban, said Michael Strande, deputy director for the Center for Tobacco
Regulation, Mitigation and Advocacy at University of Maryland School of Law.
Commissioner Dean Minnich said a smoking ban would infringe on residents? rights to make personal decisions.
“I appreciate the fact that people don?t like to be around cigarette smoke, but they have a choice to leave,” he said.
“We should stop trying to legislate someone else?s personal habits. The greatest threat is not secondhand smoke, but the continuing incursion on personal freedoms.”
And no discussion about smoking bans has occurred during the county?s monthly Environmental Advisory Council meetings, said the council?s chairwoman Karen Merkle.
Educating the public and assisting in remediation efforts for the 100 wells countywide that are contaminated with methyl tertiary butyl ether ? a gas additive and potential carcinogen ? have consumed most of the council?s efforts this year, she said.
Three ways Carroll can pass a smoking ban
1. Commissioners request a ban and General Assembly passes the legislation as a “local courtesy.”
2. Commissioners convene as the local health board and pass a regulation under the umbrella of nuisance and diseases.
3. State lawmakers vote for a statewide smoking ban, a bill that has failed four times in the past four years.
Source: Michael Strande, deputy director for the Center for Tobacco Regulation, Mitigation and Advocacy at University of Maryland School of Law
