Sonoma County may set price floor on cigarettes to deter underage smokers
Sonoma County supervisors on Tuesday are poised to take up sweeping new regulations aimed at making it more costly - and thus more difficult - for minors to purchase cigarettes and other tobacco products outside city limits.
An ambitious anti-smoking campaign, spearheaded by county health officials, seeks to impose new licensing fees on retailers who sell tobacco in the unincorporated area. The licensing regulation would require tobacco sellers to permanently raise the price they charge for a pack of cigarettes to a minimum of $7. Retailers would retain the additional income, while the county would use the money from licensing fees - an estimated $140,000 a year from a total of 140 stores outside city limits - to pay for sting operations targeting sale of tobacco to underage customers.
The premise behind the campaign is that the higher cost of tobacco products - including cigarettes, chewing tobacco and cigars - and the bolstered enforcement of laws prohibiting sale of tobacco products to people under 18 will cut down tobacco use by minors.
If approved, Sonoma County would become the first jurisdiction in California to set a price floor for cigarettes and other tobacco products, and the second in the nation to adopt minimum pricing laws designed to curb teen smoking, after New York City.
“No one has done this in California,” said Serena Chen, advocacy director for the American Lung Association in California. “Evidence has shown that tobacco retail licenses help prevent stores from selling to minors, and we’ve also seen that higher cigarette pricing can help prevent young kids from starting to experiment with tobacco in the first place.”
Imposing licensing fees on tobacco retailers, however, is an increasingly common practice that local governments across California and the country use to deter underage smoking and pay for enforcement of tobacco laws aimed at minors.
Sonoma County’s proposal would require tobacco retailers - liquor stores, gas stations and groceries - to purchase a seller’s license for around $1,000 a year. The proposed ordinance also would reclassify e-cigarettes as tobacco products, and impose the same regulatory requirements on businesses that sell them. County health officials said revenue the licenses would generate would be used to pay for two half-time employees to run the program in addition to coordinating sting operations with police departments.
“We’ve not done a good job of preventing kids from starting to smoke,” said Brian Vaughn, a county health policy director. “And right now, there isn’t proper enforcement of underage smoking laws - it’s more like irregular shoulder-tapping, so we’re trying take an evidence-based approach to reducing youth access and purchasing of tobacco products.”
The county - which cannot boost California’s cigarette tax of 87 cents per pack - is seeking to take advantage of one avenue local governments have to financially wade into the cigarette market. Its proposal is the latest in a series of local initiatives that seek to crack down on smoking.
The Santa Rosa City Council last week advanced rules that would ban smoking tobacco in attached homes, and Healdsburg last year became the first city in the state to bar retailers from selling tobacco products to people under 21, while also requiring retailers to purchase a tobacco license.
New county laws would increase local compliance checks, and in order for retailers to retain their annual license, business owners would have to agree to sell cigarettes for at least $7 a pack. Though many stores currently sell cigarettes for that price or more, tobacco companies offer widespread discounting specials to business owners for lowering their price per pack. In exchange for selling at lower prices, retailers get financial kickbacks to display advertising and tobacco companies can create more smokers at a young age, critics, health officials and local business owners said.
“This would prevent that discounting,” Vaughn said. “We’re just setting a minimum price and not allowing the tobacco industry to offer financial incentives to retailers for discounted tobacco products, thereby selling more.”
The county’s anti-smoking initiative, advanced by the Board of Supervisors last June, has been met with sharp criticism from local retailers who say requiring them to pay an annual licensing fee unfairly penalizes business owners who follow the rules and don’t sell to minors. New minimum pricing rules would also create an uneven marketplace, they said.
Take, for example, the case of two brothers who own businesses in Sonoma County. Pete Mogannam, owner of the 4th Street Market and Deli in downtown Santa Rosa, wouldn’t be subject to the new rules because he operates in the city. But his brother Ned Mogannam, who owns Larkfield Liquor and Deli north of Santa Rosa, would have to buy the annual license and agree not to offer deals on cigarettes.
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