SGA faces a decision on smoking ban proposal
The Student Government Association has recently propsed a tightening of smoking regulations on campus. GCSU currently has limited restrictions banning smoking indoors, in residential housing and student facilities. The new proposal, written by Billy Grace, SGA senator, would prevent the smoking of cigarettes within a 30-foot-radius of any doorway, window or air duct.
After two open forums over the past two weeks, with a total of 50 faculty, students and staff in attendance, the propsal began to get hazy. The forums were hosted by SGA, and faculty senate’s Resource, Planning and Institutional Policy Committee.
“There are probably not five people on this campus who know where all the air intakes are. I don’t even know and I was the plant director for years,” Dave Groseclose, assistant vice president for plant safety, said. “Some places [on campus] would require smokers to stand in the grass on front campus. You wouldn’t be able to walk between buildings.”
For art students in Mayfair Hall, a building located on the corner of Clark and Hancock streets, a smoke break 30 feet from any doorway, window or air duct would land smokers into an intense high-stakes game of Frogger.
Other evolving issues include the cost of weatherproof signs. State law allows universities to define their own regulations and provides them with the power to designate smoking and non-smoking areas as long as signs are visible. These signs would come out of the school’s budget unless they were donated to the school, as was the case a few years ago.
In 2003, The Tobacco Prevention Center in Macon donated two boxes of ‘No Smoking’ signs to GCSU. The signs were to be placed on campus in locations approved by SGA and Interim President David Brown. The signs were erected, but most of them were torn down within days.
If this type of resistance against smoking policies persists, enforcing this new rule may become a problem for campus police. A smoking culprit who smokes within a 30-foot radius of any doorway, air duct or window would be fined $100.
Quintus Sibley, director of legal affairs, explains how rules regarding smoking may not be feasible. “Something like this would be hard to prove in court. The first question the judge will ask the officer is, ‘Did you have a tape measurer?’ Most likely the answer will be no,” Sibley said. “No smoking, we can enforce. All this in between leaves a lot of loose ends untied.”
A complete smoking-ban on campus would introduce a new set of issues and decisions.
Time would be an issue for smoking faculty who would be required to trek across campus to an approved smoking area.
This suggestion had Andrei Barkovskii, Microbiology professor, on edge at one of the open forums.
“What about bad weather,” Barkovskii said. “Would you erect smoking stations for rainy weather?”
On some smoke-free campuses across the nation, bus-stop-like stations have been set up for smokers. The construction of these units would cost upwards of $10,000.
In the GCSU Policy Fact Sheet, the major issue about smoking on campus is that “many smokers are inconsiderate and gather at entrances to buildings and outside windows and other air vents. This allows smoke into the buildings where people work and are fumigated with tobacco smoke. The campus is littered daily with hundreds of cigarette butts, which is aesthetically very unpleasing. ”
In an unscientific straw poll, GCSU students said that moving ashtrays would be the most appropriate solution. Moving urns for ashtrays takes manpower not money.
“So they don’t want people not to smoke near doorways, yet that is exactly where the ashtrays are. Look at the library, it’s like a smoking station,” Robert Galyean, senior English major, said.
So will GCSU snuff out smoking on campus?
“After much discussion, RPIPC formed an ad hoc committee to draft a policy, based in part on the SGA resolution, that will address the many concerns that we heard during our two forums,” said Doug Oetter, a standing RPIPC committee officer and geography professor. “We hope to have the policy back to the full committee at our April meeting.”
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Feb 13 2009. Filed under News.
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