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Updated June 11th, 2009
City Weighs New License,
Fee for Tobacco Retailers
By ERIC NOLAND
The Outlook
Barely two months after being
crowned Miss La Cañada Flintridge
of 2007, Liah Zirler was looking to
buy a pack of smokes. She was only
16 at the time, so she was prepared
to lie about whether she had ID and
lie about her birth date.
At store after store in La Cañada
Flintridge, a clerk would place the
cigarettes on the counter in front of
her, look furtively around and quote
her the price.
Actually, Zirler had no use
whatsoever for cigarettes. She was
part of a clever sting, in which
underage local kids tested the compliance
of retailers licensed to sell
tobacco. And the results were startling:
Of 17 such businesses locally,
eight were willing to sell to the kids.
That survey, followed by two
years of deliberations by the city’s
Youth Council, has led to a proposed
new ordinance in which the
city would add a layer of regulation
for tobacco merchants. The City
Council will have a first reading of
the measure on Monday night, could
pass the ordinance as early as July 6
and require the license from local
retailers — at a fee that has yet to be
fixed — by the first week of August,
according to City Manager Mark
Alexander.
And some business owners are
not the least bit pleased.
“What are you telling me?
They’re going to put in new fees?”
said Charlie Kamar, owner of the
Union 76 station at Alta Canyada
Road. “Typical: big government, little
government.”
“That’s outrageous. Unbelievable,”
said Hayel Barakat, owner of
Ocean View Liquor. “It’s just a
license to steal money from retailers.
We’ve already been taxed twice
or three times. The City of La
Cañada is just making it harder for
those businesses to survive.”
John Payton of the La Cañada
Liquor Store was more muted in his
reaction, but no less exasperated.
“Businesses right now are struggling
in general,” he said. “I know
we’re down. I’ve talked to others
who are down. I don’t want to say
‘bigger fish to fry,’ but there are
other issues in this town. Go down
Foothill Boulevard; you can count
the number of empty businesses on
two hands.”
Proponents of the tobacco retailers’
license insist that the fee will be
used solely to administer the licensing
program — which will include
sending out “youth decoys” in the
future to determine whether cigarettes
are being sold to minors.
“We want the fee to be as modest
as possible,” said City
Councilman Don Voss, liaison to the
Youth Council. “The point is not to
raise revenue, it’s to control the sale
of tobacco.”
Other California communities
that adopted tobacco retail licenses
in the wake of similar underagebuying
stings set their annual fees
between $150 and $500, but the
local tobacco merchants contacted
by The Outlook said that even something
at the low end of that range
would be a hardship in these tough
economic straits.
The campaign stems from the
alarming events of two years ago. The Youth Purchase Survey has been
conducted in towns all over the state
since 2003, and was administered
locally with the help of Glendale
Adventist Medical Center’s
Community Services office. In La
Cañada Flintridge, 47.1% of the
tobacco retailers were willing to sell
to the kids — one of the highest figures
recorded in Los Angeles
County since the program began,
and more than three times the
statewide survey rate of 13.3% registered
the year before.
Zirler, now 19, said she was
stunned by what she found. “Most
of the places either just went
through the motions of seeing my
ID because of the (security) cameras,”
she said. “Other places asked
me how old I was, and I could just
lie.”
At one establishment, flustered,
she blurted out a birth date that
made her only 17, with a birthday
two weeks away. The clerk, she
said, responded, “OK. That’s close
enough.”
Everyone involved with the survey
emphasized that the kids did not
actually make purchases — no one
wanted to have an underage person
break one law to catch an adult
breaking another. So, just as the sale
was about to be consummated, the
would-be buyers would remark that
their money was out in the car and
leave the store for good.
Voss agreed that the data from
the 2007 survey is “a little stale, but
the indication we get is that from a
statewide and local perspective, the
trend is still the same.”
Jeff Tobias, chairman of the
Youth Council, agrees. If a minor
wishes to buy tobacco in La Cañada
Flintridge, he said, “It’s not hard to
do, from what I’ve heard. Not a lot
of my friends smoke cigarettes, so I
don’t see it much over at Flintridge
Prep, but I do see it all over La
Cañada High School and the city in
general. It doesn’t appear to be the
most difficult thing to do.”
Zirler added: “I think it’s still a
problem. I know some people who
have gotten cigarettes by just lying,
or (going to) a place that doesn’t
card. They’ll say, ‘Go to that gas
station over there, they don’t card.’ ”
The local retailers interviewed
by The Outlook — each of which
insisted it complies strictly — note
that there is already a layer of state
regulation. They pay a fee to the
state Board of Equalization for the
right to sell tobacco products.
But Guadulesa Rivera, community
advocate for Glendale
Adventist Medical Center — and
someone who participated in the
Youth Purchase Survey here —
maintains that state compliance
checks are inadequate. “Most times,
they’re checking to see if the retailer
has the proper stamp, to make
sure they’re paying the state tax,”
she said. “There’s enough funding
to check about 3 percent of retailers
in any given year (in underage
stings). When you have a local ordinance,
that money stays in the city,
and you can gear compliance
checks to your own local needs.”
A survey conducted by the
Center for Tobacco Policy &
Organizing found that the local
ordinances produce dramatic
results, causing underage sales to
plummet. For example, Coachella
experienced a drop from 69% to
11%, Desert Hot Springs from 48%
to 4%, Pasadena from 20% to 0%.
“I’m not against it,” said Payton
of La Cañada Liquor. “But in the
framework of where we are right
now from a financial standpoint, it’s
not the time to be taxing businesses.
I know in my store we check everything.
“And if they’re going to do this,
I want them to report the ones that
complied. If I’m going to pay the
$150, and I get a clean bill of health,
I want there to be something that
says this is a clean store.”
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