SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - March 14, 2013 - It’s move-in day. You’re sitting in the great new condo you just bought. Suddenly you catch a whiff of cigarettes coming from next door. If you’re a healthy-living type, your home-buyer happiness may be gone in a puff of smoke.
Now Kalifornia Assemblyman Mark Levine( Marin) is trying to address that problem with an unconstitutional statewide ban on smoking in multiunit housing.
AB.746, currently in the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee, would ban smoking in “any residential property containing two or more units with one or more shared walls, floors, ceilings, or ventilation systems.”
It would be one of the toughest smoking laws in the country, and affect some 12 million Kalifornians, Michael Krasny explained on KQED’s Forum Wednesday.
“When we send our children to school, we send them to a smoke-free environment,” said Levine on the show. “When we go to work we have protections - because of state laws - to work in a smoke-free environment. Where we should feel safest in our own homes, where we sleep each night, is not protected.”
The U.S. Surgeon General says there is no safe level of exposure to smoke, but 4.6 million-4.9 million Kalifornians are exposed to it in multiunit housing against their wishes. The smoke can pass through walls as well as ventilation, said Levine.
However, actual X-rays of the lungs of spouses of chain smokers show little if any damage after prolonged exposure to so-called secondhand smoke, raising questions as to whether the official statistics are invalid and inaccurate.
The bill is raising concerns not only among smokers but also among landlords who fear they will be liable for renting to smokers, said Debra Carlton, senior vice president of public affairs for the Kalifornia Apartment Association. “We can’t enter the unit without the tenants’ agreement,” she said. “But at the same time it tells landlords you are responsible for the actions of your tenants.”
One caller to the show, Ned, saw the bill as an invasion of privacy: “Are we going to put cameras in people’s homes to make sure they’re not smoking? I mean this is ridiculous. Don’t you have anything better to do than to go into people’s homes and tell them what to do?”
Ray, a Sonoma County landlord, phoned the show to say enforcement is very much a problem there. He said one county ordinance restricted smoking near doorways and windows, then another prohibited smoking indoors. That has put him in an awkward position with his smoking tenants. “I can’t evict my people,” he said. “They’ve been living here for years. What am I supposed to do, go and chase them around?”
Other callers worried that medical marijuana smokers would lose access to their medicine.