Smoking ban in plaza would test limits
A proposal to ban smoking in an outdoor plaza beside Quincy City Hall is raising questions - even among potential supporters. The issues of civil rights, practical convenience, and the public policy wisdom of banning smoking outdoors are being raised by local officials and smoking policy experts.
Police Chief Robert Crowley proposed the ban at a recent license hearing for outdoor seating at a restaurant that faces the plaza. Crowley said a smoking ban would discourage loitering in the area, called McIntyre Mall, and the restaurant's owner said a ban would please her customers and keep the area cleaner.
"We like the mall to be for everyone," Crowley said. "McIntyre Mall is a nice place to sit and a nice place to have a sandwich."
He said the mayor and the City Council were receptive to the idea of the plaza smoking ban, which has yet to receive an official hearing. The next step is for Crowley to submit a formal proposal to the City Council, something he says he intends to do.
The grassy area with benches and flowers borders City Hall and leads to the Quincy Center MBTA station. The prohibition of smoking in the train station leads to more smoking in the plaza, Crowley said, and an attractive public space invites idlers, especially in the summer. Some gatherings can discourage others from using the urban park, he said.
"They hang around, we move them around," Crowley said. "I just think a smoking ban would be a tool" for police to use to keep groups from congregating.
The city has no law against loitering, and some residents question whether it's fair to use a smoking ban to accomplish the same end.
"We've put benches out there for people to sit," said Dave Murphy, the city's director of operations, pointing to the risk of restricting civil rights. "Are we going to prevent people from sitting in the benches we put out there?"
"There's a fine line between behavior that's intimidating or keeping other people away" and exercising personal freedoms, he said.
Murphy said Mayor William Phelan will consider the proposal, but could not yet be counted as a supporter.
While area workers and commuters who grab a quick smoke in the plaza can be expected to oppose a ban, even some supporters of restrictions on smoking in public areas have reservations toward an outdoor smoking ban. Dr. Michael Siegel, a smoking policy researcher and a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, said that banning smoking outdoors lacks the public health rationale that justified indoor bans.
"In my view workplace smoking bans were really based on the science," Siegel said. Studies showed that workers were "literally dying" on the job "from breathing in second-hand smoke."
But there is no scientific evidence that walking past a smoker outdoors poses a significant health risk, he said. And pushing smoking bans on indoor public spaces to outside areas may weaken the anti-smoking movement by depriving it of its true rationale.
"We're losing our science base," he said. "Then we lose our justification."
City Council president Doug Gutro, who wants to give a smoking ban due consideration, said it should be narrowly enough focused on loiterers - possibly limited to the hours of dusk to dawn - so that it would not prevent office workers from taking a smoking break there. City rules shouldn't make it "extraordinarily difficult" to smoke a cigarette outdoors, he said.
But a selective ban could be useful, he said; it would give police the means to move some "unsavory characters" from the area.
Although the effort to chase loiterers from a public park comes on the heels of a move to ban homeless people from spending the night on Boston Common, Crowley said a smoking ban was not aimed at driving the homeless out of the plaza. "Absolutely not," Crowley said. "No city has been better to the homeless than Quincy."
Murphy said the city addresses the issue not by banning the homeless from public places but by creating housing. Two years ago, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development recognized Quincy's HOME program, which sets goals for the creation of new housing units, as one of the best efforts in the nation.
Advocates for the homeless, smokers' rights, police concerns, and local businesses would all be heard in a public hearing process before city councilors take any action on banning smoking in the plaza, Gutro said.
Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.
