East Hampton Town’s beach advisory committee has recommended that the town board ban smoking of all types, including vaping and the smoking of tobacco and cannabis, for a specified distance to be determined from lifeguard-protected areas during hours that lifeguards are on duty.
Councilman David Lys suggested to his colleagues during Tuesday’s work session that an increase in the smoking of cannabis in particular has been observed on beaches. In a PowerPoint presentation during the virtual meeting, he displayed aerial maps of the town’s bathing beaches delineated with color-coded buffer zones on either side of lifeguarded areas based on distance. Distances of 100, 250, and 500 feet from those areas were depicted.
A ban would apply from the toe of the dune to the water, Mr. Lys said. Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez suggested that such a ban also be extended to beaches’ parking lots, given the potential for a ban on the beach to concentrate smokers there.
One hundred feet seems too short a distance, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said, but 250 feet “seems a little long.” Later, he mused that the right distance might be half the length of a football field. “The 50-yard line,” or 150 feet, “would seem far enough away to me,” he said. “It’s not that much fun sitting downwind, breathing that beautiful sea air, and then somebody lights up a cigar.”
But the discussion soon moved toward a greater distance when board members and Tim Treadwell, a senior harbormaster, considered the distances for which dogs are restricted at ocean beaches during the summer season (500 feet in either direction from the road end) and for which alcohol is prohibited at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett (1,000 feet during lifeguarded hours). A consensus was quickly reached that smoking should be prohibited within 500 feet of lifeguard-protected areas.
Councilwoman Sylvia Overby said she would consider even a 1,000-foot span. Discarded cigarette butts, she said, “are the most prolific thing found as trash on beaches” and should be eliminated. “They contain all kinds of toxins,” she said. “They’re not good for wildlife.”
The supervisor asked if the distance would be demarcated. “Yes, I think that’s most appropriate,” was Mr. Lys’s reply.
Amending the town code would require a public hearing, which the board will schedule. Any code modifications pertaining to beaches outside of Montauk would also require the consent of the town trustees, who have jurisdiction over those beaches on behalf of the public.
Mr. Lys said he would contact Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, “to see how his board looks at this potential regulation.”
