Santa Cruz City council “bans the butt,” goes into effect in 2027

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION-TV) - The Santa Cruz City Council made history today in the saga of tobacco regulations, voting unanimously to pass a first-of-its-kind ban on filtered cigarette sales.

Environmental groups like Save Our Shores tell me they’ve been fighting for something like this for years.

"We've been collecting data on our cleanups, on our beaches in the Monterey Bay region for decades. And cigarette butts have time and time and again come up as a number one item we continue to find and pick up on our beaches," Save Our Shores executive director Katie Thompson said.

They argue no-smoking signs and public ashtrays are not enough to curb the effects of widely littered butts, which have toxins that hurt vital ecosystems like the ones in Santa Cruz.

There were two meetings and two votes to get this done. Public comment at the first meeting was dominated by folks on the Save Our Shores side of the debate, but the second was almost entirely people calling instead to “save our stores.”

Many convenience store owners said the ban would drastically hurt their revenue.

"A lot of our business owners are first or second-generation business owners. And so it's really impacting what we would consider that 'American Dream' to be," said California Fuels and Convenience Alliance CEO Elizabeth Graham.

She is with a trade association for convenience stores.

"This is pretty typical of local government not doing their homework and relying on data from one entity that just happens to be the environmentalist," Graham said. "And if they would have brought us to the table, we could have brought them a lot more data where they could have made an educated decision. And I think they were very flippant about what they decided to do."

The ban begins in January 2027, with the city planning on working with businesses to ease the transition.

But apart from pointing them to the Business Services department, there wasn’t much on what that would look like.

"How is this city council going to help our businesses pivot? What solutions do they actually have?" Graham asked. "There was nothing up there that had any solutions."

Some store owners told me off camera - they felt that the city had made up its mind before any debate… and that biases against smoking were a bigger factor than the environmental consideration.

"6 percent of Californians smoke, 94% of us are breathing in that smoke and picking up that toxic waste. So we need to be thinking about what's good for all of us," Thompson said.

"What I find very fascinating is that this is a specific ban on tobacco filters. So it does not consider any of the other type of filters for cannabis," says Graham.

There’s a lot of skepticism about whether a ban like this will work.

"It's kind of silly because people are gonna do it anyway. People are gonna come from other places that have cigarettes with butts on them, like I’m coming from oakland. It’s not gonna solve the problem," local tattoo artist Stash said.

Groups like Save Our Shores know that, but a similar ban was already taken up in unincorporated areas of the county.

Thompson said her groups will continue pushing to “ban the butt," next in Capitola, and eventually, up and down the california coast.

Now retailers can still sell filtered cigarettes for the next year and a half.

Starting in 2027, it will be interesting to see how effective the ban is, especially since this is uncharted territory.