As Co-Chair of Tobacco Free Solano I spoke for a while at this event by Solano County Department of Health on the success of the two ordinance to control tobacco in Vallejo over the past few years. I’m so honored to be doing this work locally to be making a difference in our county’s largest city (where I live) and making a better life with less lethal addiction to the youth of Vallejo, who deserve a smoke-free world.

The audio quality is not the greatest, but hopefully people will be able to interpret what I’m saying. It might behoove one to turn on captions.

As we were celebrating the win of the Vallejo Tobacco Retail license passing here in Vallejo with lots of strength, I was honored with a certificate for the many hours our coalition worked together to get this passed, not to mention the Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing that we passed several years ago.

Shea joined me in a celebration of local success in saving lives from tobacco in Oakland. Advocates with our coalition led by LGBTQ Minus Tobacco were instrumental in a new ordinance for smoke-free bar patios there. Hopefully, San Francisco will soon follow so that more lives can be saved from Big Tobacco. Now patrons and staff at bars can safely traverse the open spaces without being subjected to toxic smoke as is the case in restaurants already.

I love the mosaic art in this community center on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland where we gathered.

Most people know that I’m a second-generation Californian and most of my rearing when we were not in NYC, Spain, and Italy was in the East Bay, so the same county as Oakland. Oakland has long been a leading large city in the effort to reduce death by tobacco, even though this is the area we were living in when my father died from his tobacco addiction. He only lived to be 50 years old, as did his mom who also died of tobacco-related illness.

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:

In a dramatic roller-coaster of a night, what should have been quite routine, a second reading of the ordinance, became chaos, when a last-minute vote struck it down due to some requests for what amount to minor changes on the part of the tobacco retailers. Fortunately, the lawyers on the council were able to save the day and a motion was made to bring back the item for a vote that same night and it passed. There are crumbling about some amendments that might be made, but the two years of work were not for naught. This was as good a xmas gift as I could hope for due to the sweat equity so many of us on our coalition put into this ordinance. I did not speak because it was unclear that I needed to, and by the time I left, I was miffed that it did not pass.

A fury of communications ensued after my colleagues and I departed from City Hall. To my glee, I got the good news that Vallejo youth will now be protected as the second jurisdiction in Solano County, the largest city jurisdiction in Solano County, and one of the recorded worst jurisdictions in the Bay Area in some years for youth tobacco sales. Here are the relevant parts of the TRL drama from this evening, on what was otherwise a very long night:

Here’s a video of my last attempt to remotely convince the Oakland City Council that their Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing ordinance was pathetic. I’m so glad Vallejo at least did it right, without a smoking of cannabis exemption. It’s so short-sighted not to protect all residents of multi-unit housing from second-hand smoke. At least the ordinance improved the lives of bar employees and bar patrons who wish to enjoy fresh air on bar patios.

Here’s the text of what I said (including what got cut off):

“I’m here as a volunteer member of the Alameda County Tobacco Control Coalition speaking on item 5.5. It’s really disappointing that an exception was made for cannabis SMOKING in the attempt to pass a smokefree multi unit housing ordinance.  How many times did the doctors and experts without a cannabis lobby agenda have to testify in front of the Oakland City Council that there are a plethora of ways to ingest cannabis that does NOT affect the immune-compromised and otherwise vulnerable neighbors who don’t want smoke wafting into their windows, electric plugs and residential patios?  Whose interest is being protected when the Oakland city council only concentrates on the cannabis lobby talking points and not the health of citizens who almost never have the means to pick up and move because they are tormented by the lack of fresh air in their own homes?  Medicinal or not, there is no MANDATE that cannabis be smoked even though that has been normalized, and this aspect of the smoke-free policy for Oakland is now just another unenforceable piece of paper posing as an ordinance.  I encourage you to revisit this flawed logic.  There is no doctor who can honestly say that the healthiest way to ingest cannabis is through particulates entering the lungs. At the same time, at least you got the smoke-free bar patios portion of the ordinance right.  For that, I thank the council on behalf of Oakland bar employees and patrons that want fresh air while working or outside consuming drinks. Thank you.”

Here is the entire video of the Consent Item’s public comments. In Oakland they combine all consent item comments at the same time, so some of them are not germane to the 5.5 ordinance on Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing and Bar Patios:

I spoke on the consent item with Vallejo receiving about $930,000 in California Department of Justice funds to facilitate the forthcoming Tobacco Retail License.

I also spoke on the action item regarding the first reading of the TRL.

While it isn’t the most robust TRL I had hoped for, finally MY CITY and a second jurisdiction in Solano County (the largest city by far) has now started the process of addressing the historically high commercial tobacco youth sales rates that had no enforcement. This TRL will reduce blights and food deserts, and facilitate far fewer youth from becoming addicts who will die miserably after suffering from tobacco-related illness.

I spoke on the consent calendar and the specific action calendar item with many colleagues and amazing Vallejo youth (some as young as 13). The hashing out of some of the details by the council was frustrating, but at least it’s a pretty strong TRL. The one-time seven-year grace period with which to sell the businesses with the tobacco license exemption to strangers is at least a date certain (January 1, 2032). Still, the licenses to sell to close family members are in perpetuity, unfortunately. Still, we should be able to chip away at the 100 retailers and get it down to the goal of under 50, depending on the population of Vallejo at that time.

I’m very disappointed at the lack of understanding of the penalty structure by most city council members. More years during which time to accumulate the penalties is actually better for enforcement. Still, the council decided only to make the retailers forego the privilege of transferring the license if they are caught three times in one year. Without even ONE mandated check on businesses per year, and all the whining about the lack of resources and the challenges of hiring a coalition partner like Bay Area Community Resources, the odds of any of these bad actor retailers getting caught three times in a year before the tabulation resets is extremely unlikely. We’d have to have the efficiency of the best surgeon to accomplish that kind of monitoring of a single retailer.