I spoke at Vallejo City Council twice last night. One of the times was on the tobacco retailer fee amounts for the recently adopted Tobacco Retail License that my coalition and I worked so hard to get adopted here with youth activists who have the most to lose if we do not do something about the rampant youth tobacco sales in Vallejo which heretofore had no enforcement mechanisms for laws that been on the books for decades to not sell tobacco to minors, for example.

As Councilmember Bregenzer said, it’s sad that we’re already watering down the ordinance. Youth advocates came to City Council begging for help in improving their lives, but instead, the concentration and the bulk of the time spent on this was to benefit tobacco retailers who keep pushing for unlimited restrictions on selling their businesses with the privilege of continuing to sell poison. No attention was paid that next door in Benicia, for example, no such right exists AT ALL, as is often the case with these tobacco retail licenses.

Here is the video with my first comment on tobacco retail license fees:

What I said (almost verbatim) was:

With all the hullabaloo about the number of years to give tobacco sellers transferability to maximize profit on resale, which appears to mean zero consideration in changing business models to sell healthy products that nourish our community rather than poisoning it, I want to point out that the state of California and other progressive jurisdictions are already working on different ways of reducing the suffering caused by tobacco addiction and curtailing the privilege of selling addictive products that kill when used as directed.  

Pollution caused by disposable tobacco products, including cigarette filters and disposable vapes, is becoming intolerable to many cities and counties. 

• Santa Cruz just passed the First-in-the-World Cigarette Filter Ban to mitigate pollution.  
• Many cities in Massachusetts are forbidding anyone born after [I said probably “before” by mistake] 2004 to purchase tobacco products for their entire lives.
• Some cities in California like Burlingame are already not issuing any more tobacco retail licenses PERIOD.
• Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills in southern California completely disallow commercial tobacco sales within their city limits.  

Accordingly, a lot of these transferability arguments are moot whether the transfer is in two years or twenty given current trends, despite Big Tobacco coming up with new poisonous products meant to skirt these laws as we enact them.  

All the procrastination of reaching the reduced number of tobacco retailers in Vallejo may make a few people profiting off of the pain of our families feel somewhat vindicated, but I don’t know how it helps anyone sleep better at night. 

What should always be paramount is the health of our population, especially our children.  Every day Big Tobacco finds opportunities to normalize the media portrayal of ingesting carcinogens that have no medicinal or nutritional benefit.  Anything they can get away with to prolong addiction and find new customers is delaying the inevitable if empirical evidence and science even matter anymore. 

Here is the video with my second comment on tobacco license transferability:

What I said (almost verbatim) was:

While I’m very pleased Vallejo now has a Tobacco Retail License, making it the second city in Solano County to have one, I’m still disappointed that the mandate of at least one yearly check per retailer was not included as per the language of the Public Health Law Center model, particularly when almost all other elements of the model were wholly adopted in Vallejo. 

Presuming the TRL will indeed be properly enforced, I once again ask that reporting to the city council be brought at regular intervals.  Quarterly reports on how many retailers were checked and how many follow-ups were done on those retailers who did not comply should be an obvious goal here.  I would think after all of the time and effort the city council put into the enactment of the ordinance, the progress should be presented for Vallejoans to see and appreciate.  As a reminder, the intent of this was to always be revenue neutral, so not just the compliance checks, but the follow-ups should be budgeted when taking into account the fee for tobacco retailers.  

If there is any concern as to why the fees are so high to begin with, one only needs to remember that Vallejo was proven to be the jurisdiction with the worst tobacco youth sale rates in the entire Bay Area.  That’s literally why we came to the city council with this daunting problem.  Even Benicia next door with the TRL they passed in 2019 had the reality of knowing that youth in their city and other nearby cities could easily just come to Vallejo to reliably get tobacco products.  Vallejo needs to do everything it can to make sure that this is never the reality again, and like magic some of the blight will diminish.  Thank you.

Here is a video of the entire drama on December 30th’s meeting: