Allegheny County Council - File #: 2705-06

• File #: 2705-06
• Version: 3
• Name: An Ordinance to prohibit smoking in certain public places and workplaces, and providing for penalties for violations.
• Type: Ordinance
• Status: Approved
• File created: 7/12/2006
• In control: Committee on Health & Human Services
• Final action: 9/26/2006
• Title: An Ordinance to prohibit smoking in certain public places and workplaces, and providing for penalties for violations.
• Sponsors: Rich Fitzgerald, Michael Finnerty, William Robinson, Susan Caldwell, Chuck Martoni, Bob Macey, Joan Cleary, Jim Burn, Brenda Frazier, John DeFazio

Date	Ver.	Action By	Action	Result
10/4/2006	3	Chief Executive	Signed by Chief Executive
9/26/2006	2	County Council	Amended and Passed for Chief Executive Signature	Pass
9/19/2006	1	Committee on Health & Human Services	Amended and Affirmatively Recommended as Amended	Pass
8/15/2006	1	Committee on Health & Human Services	Held in Committee
7/27/2006	1	Committee on Health & Human Services	Held in Committee
7/12/2006	1	County Council	Referred

TITLE
An Ordinance to prohibit smoking in certain public places and workplaces, and providing for penalties for violations.

BODY
WHEREAS, Many studies have found that tobacco smoke is a major contributor to indoor air pollution and that exposure to secondhand smoke is a cause of many serious health diseases in adult non-smokers and children; and

WHEREAS, A significant portion of structure fires are caused by cigarettes; and

WHEREAS, This Ordinance is enacted to further protect the public's health and welfare from the dangerous, unnecessary and involuntary health risks associated with exposure to secondhand smoke; now, therefore,

The Council of the County of Allegheny hereby enacts as follows:

SECTION 1. Legislative Findings. The Council finds that:

(a) Tobacco smoke, whether inhaled through smoking or indirectly through exposure to smoky environments contains more than 4,000 known chemical compounds that are released into the air as particles and gases.

(b) According to a 2001 report issued by the National Cancer Institute, there are sixty-nine known or probable carcinogens in tobacco smoke.

(c) In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published results of an environmental tobacco smoke study, whose rates applied to Allegheny County population data for 2005 suggest that each year 227 non-smoking residents die from lung cancer as a result of environmental tobacco smoke exposure.

(d) For children, the 1999 EPA report concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke is causally associated with increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections, such as bronchitis and pneumonia; increased prevalence of fluid in the middle ear; and, increased symptoms of upper respiratory tract irritation, is responsible for increases the number of episodes and the severity of symptoms in asthmatic children, and causes thousands of non-asthmatic children to develop this co...