SANTA CRUZ — When the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors agreed to ban the sale of filtered cigarettes late last year, it was the most significant policy win for a movement that had roots dating back more than a decade.
The orange-tipped smoking sticks, chock full of chemicals and microplastics, stand head and shoulders above any other item of trash picked up along local shores during beach cleanups.
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“Even at the county level, for it to be effective, we have to have not only the unincorporated county but all the city jurisdictions banning filtered tobacco products,” explained Katie Thompson, executive director of Save Our Shores, which has helped lead the “ban the butt” effort locally. “Because we can’t have these holes within the county where people can continue to buy filtered cigarettes.”
Partner cities
While other municipalities in California such as Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills have outlawed the sale of tobacco altogether, Santa Cruz County is the first to embrace a ban on filtered products in hopes that it grows into something larger.
Because the authority of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors was limited to unincorporated county territory — still no small feat, given that’s where half the county’s population resides — smokers can still simply stop in at any one of the four incorporated county cities for a pack before heading to the coast. What’s more, the cities also have a special role to play when it comes to the mechanics of shifting the law into action.
Billed as a feature that will help local retailers adjust, enforcement of the county’s ordinance was delayed until Jan. 1, 2027, or until two other local jurisdictions pass similar prohibitions, whichever is later. So as the movement to rid the county of filtered tobacco products starts to pick up where it left off last October, it has set its sights on a new goal: enlisting partner cities.
At an event in March put on by Save Our Shores to infuse energy back into the butt ban movement, 3rd District county Supervisor Justin Cummings, who sponsored the county’s policy alongside Supervisor Manu Koenig, said it made sense for the county to be the first one through the wall. He noted that given its broad authority and access to legal resources, the jurisdiction was in a strong position to handle any tobacco companies if they challenged the ordinance in court.
Tara Leonard, a senior health educator with the county who helped craft the ordinance, confirmed that as of Friday the county had not been subject to any lawsuits or tort claims relating to the tobacco filter ban.
Thompson said the outlaw effort will first turn its attention to the cities of Capitola and Santa Cruz, thinking they are most likely to embrace the policy despite potentially needing some encouragement. Leonard said she will be presenting an informational item about filtered cigarette impacts at the Capitola City Council’s meeting April 10.
Thompson hopes the non-action item this month will eventually lead to the drafting of a new ordinance in Capitola that could then build momentum in Santa Cruz where, according to Thompson, another informational item is tentatively being planned for some time in June.
Leonard added that the city of Santa Cruz has already planned a public open house about tobacco and tobacco product waste from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on April 29 at the London Nelson Community Center. The center is at 301 Center St. in Santa Cruz.
Cummings emphasized at the March event that there has to be widespread buy-in for any real impact to be felt, given the pervasiveness of cigarette litter.
“While we do want to focus on trying to get Capitola and Santa Cruz maybe to be the first two,” Cummings said, “we really want Capitola, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Scotts Valley and then we want to start moving down to Monterey and keep moving north and south.”
‘Viable’ statewide strategy
While advocates argue a demonstration of momentum will be key for regional adoption, their ambitions extend well beyond that. Thompson said the project to end sales of filtered tobacco products looks to take a page out of the plastic bag abolition campaign that played out in Santa Cruz County 14 years ago.
The county Board of Supervisors approved one of the most stringent plastic and paper bag laws in the state in 2011, and proponents say it served as a testing ground for a statewide law that was implemented only a few years later. Mark Stone, who championed the plastic bag ban as the 5th District county supervisor and went on to serve for a decade in the state Assembly, told the Sentinel that applying the plastic bag template to filtered cigarettes could prove to be a shrewd strategic move.
“Taking an effort like this, that has proven to be controversial at the state, and bringing it down to local jurisdictions who understand what the value is and are not as tied up in the political constraints that the (state) Legislature is, I think it’s a viable strategy,” said Stone. “If other cities and counties will do the same thing, that does then kind of signal the state to be able to step in before these other ordinances do take effect.”
Stone expressed some disappointment about the caveats attached to the county’s ordinance that seemingly slow-played its implementation, and for understandable reasons. As a California assemblymember, he made four attempts to get a filtered cigarette ban passed, but all efforts died within various committees and stages of the legislative process. Stone said it was due, in part, to large tobacco companies flexing their political muscle.
Even though, by Stone’s estimation, less than 12% of Californians smoked while he was spearheading these bills, “the tobacco industry was still spending millions of dollars targeted in the Legislature, which meant it was going to be very, very difficult to get anything through.”
That strategy will be much harder to pull off at the local level, as was demonstrated during the plastic bag ban when the county received little to no opposition from major plastics industry players, according to Stone.
“Big Tobacco doesn’t have the same level of controls at these myriad of local jurisdictions that they do singularly in the state,” he said. “They’d be hard pressed, I think, to block local jurisdictions from being able to take these steps. And if enough of them do, then that will force state action or force the state to relook at it.”
The ‘ciggy board’
But efforts to build momentum aren’t reserved just for the political arena; there’s a cultural component too. Save Our Shores, with help from Cummings’ and Koenig’s offices, hosted a screening in March of “The Cigarette Surfboard,” a documentary from Ben Judkins and Taylor Lane about surfboards that are layered with discarded cigarette butts picked up from local beaches.
Local surfer and activist Taylor Lane stands with the “ciggy board” he designed using thousands of discarded cigarette butts. Lane was among a group of local environmental advocates that implored the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors last fall to adopt a ban on the sale of filtered cigarette products in unincorporated territory. (PK Hattis – Santa Cruz Sentinel file)While Lane, the surfboard’s designer, made a point of shaping a board that is actually rideable under the harshest conditions — the movie climaxes with Lane taking his “ciggy board” out for a session at the world-famous, big wave surf spot Mavericks near Half Moon Bay — he explained that it also serves as a conduit into broader discussions about the harmful impacts of filtered cigarettes.
“We realized that this project was a vessel for the larger issue of addressing this global pollution,” said Lane, who designed the board in Santa Cruz. “And what better place to start than in the community where these boards are from, where surfing is a part of the community and the environment is a pillar of this community. If we can’t do it in Santa Cruz, where those two things are so in conjunction with our lifestyle, where else is it going to happen?”
In addition to leaching out toxic chemicals such as arsenic and lead, the discarded cigarette butts eventually break down into microplastics, which seep into the local environment and have been detected in nearly every vital human organ including the brain, lungs, livers and kidneys. Additionally, health care experts have testified that the filters themselves not only provide no health benefit, but they actually cause more harm due to more frequent puffs and deeper inhalations by smokers.
Lane has played a key role in pushing the filtered cigarette message from art to action and, alongside Save Our Shores and other advocates, has lobbied local governments to implement a ban for years.
“There’s momentum, people,” said Lane. “Are we going to do it, or are we going to get scared?”
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