Strengthen city’s smoking pollution laws
Dear Editor,
The last edition of the Weekly (Sept. 11, 2015) noted that Vice Mayor Karla Brown had urged her fellow members of the Pleasanton City Council to strengthen the city’s smoking pollution ordinances. This followed the recent vote of the council to adopt the recommendation of the city’s Youth Commission to make all parks and trails smoke-free.
Pleasanton was in the vanguard of this area of public health protection when it banned cigarettes from local restaurants in 1993. But in the interim, other communities have moved past us in finding ways to protect citizens from the addictive and carcinogenic exhaust of cigarettes and e-cigarettes. This year Pleasanton got a “D” grade on the American Lung Association report card.
However, there is an easy solution: Pleasanton can adopt the same measures already put in place by surrounding cities.
Of special urgency might be appropriate regulation of the e-cigarettes, whose neon packaging and fruity and bubble gum flavors suggest they are being marketed to middle school children.
Secondly, making apartments smoke-free zones. Persons who are very young or very elderly or very poor are especially at risk of being poisoned by neighbors whose smoking pollutes not only their own apartment, but every other unit that shares floors, walls, ceilings or hallways.
— Bruce Fiedler
Why sensationalize Birdland dispute?
Dear Editor,
With all of the important issues that could be shared with the community, you chose to sensationalize a planning dispute between Birdland neighbors (“Neighborliness in Birdland takes a hit,” Pleasanton Weekly, Sept. 4, 2015).
What purpose did your article serve other than drawing negative attention to what is already a divisive subject?
— Sheila Melo
