San Francisco Supes Committee Approves Cigarette Fee
A proposal by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to levy a fee on cigarettes to help pay for the city’s cleanup of discarded butts received backing from a Board of Supervisors committee Monday.
The mayor’s office, however, Monday lowered the originally proposed 33-cent-per-pack fee to 20 cents.
Newsom praised the decision by the Budget and Finance Committee, which is expected to forward the item to the full board next week.
“All litter creates unnecessary costs for the city and its taxpayers,” he said in a prepared statement, adding, “Cigarette butts are a big part of the problem.”
The cleanup also removes toxins that can leach from the cigarette butts into groundwater or the bay and ocean, he said.
Newsom proposed the fee in May, saying it would help recover part of the more than $44 million the city spends each year cleaning litter from sidewalks and gutters. About 25 percent of that, he said, is spent on removing cigarette butts.
The reason for lowering the proposed fee Monday was to remove the costs for street sweeping—done regularly and not necessarily just to remove cigarette butts—from that equation, leaving the fee to make up only costs for cigarette cleanup that is done by hand, according to Department of the Environment spokesman Mark Westlund.
“You want to have an amount that is entirely defensible,” including from any legal challenge by cigarette manufacturers, Westlund said.
“It might not seem fair to include street sweepers,” said Westlund, “because we would in all likelihood continue those at the same frequency that we’re doing now.”
“We want this to be defensible fees that anybody can realize are just,” he said.
According to Westlund, the 20-cent cigarette fee, to be collected from retailers, is expected to garner about $6 million yearly for the city departments responsible for manual cleanup of cigarette butts, primarily the Department of Public Works and the Recreation and Park Department.
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