CONNOR HOFFMAN
Staff Writer
When SUNY announced that all 64 campuses were required to adopt some form of a Tobacco-Free Policy, it created some problems for the various campuses. The main problem was that SUNY did not provide any money to schools to help implement these policies. Fredonia has had to finance most of the efforts, including problems caused by having to implement the Tobacco-Free Policy in the first place.
Fredonia decided to become tobacco-free in 2013 because it thought it would be for good for the campus.
“[The Chancellor] was relying on data from the American Cancer Society and others that if people have not started smoking by age twenty-five chances are they’re not going to be smokers,” said President Virginia Horvath. “She was committed to the idea that if we deter people from developing or continuing smoking habits by the time they leave college, if they’re not smokers, chances are they’re not going to be smokers.”
Horvath also mentioned that the Tobacco-Free initiative was created to please non-smokers as well. She recalled that when Fredonia had not been tobacco-free, there would be clouds of smoke across campus, and how smoke even got into the academic buildings.
Tobacco-Free meant that Fredonia would have to create programs to raise awareness of the dangers of tobacco. Also, Fredonia had to create “Tobacco-Free” signs to hang up to inform the campus of the new policy.
This is due to what is called an “unfunded mandate.”
“[Unfunded mandate] means that we’re told to do something, but we’re not provided new resources to get it done,” said Horvath. “It’s not as if we got $10,000 or $20,000 to do something — and that happens a lot. Where there will be some directive that we get from the state or SUNY that you have to comply you have to do this but you have to figure out how to pay for it.”
Some students question just how effective this policy is if there wasn’t any money provided to help administer it.
“That seems a bit useless,” said Sky Mitchell, a sophomore English major, when informed that SUNY had not provided any money to help with going tobacco-free. “You can’t exactly get something done without the tools needed to actually do it.”
When Fredonia became a tobacco-free campus, it had to remove the cigarette butt holders outside of the buildings. With these butt holders now gone, students started throwing their cigarettes wherever they wanted to.
“Everytime I’m out there I see cigarette butts everywhere, and I think, [when] we have visitors to the campus, [that] it doesn’t look good,” said Horvath. “When I walk across the spine I try to have a glove with me, because I can fill a cup walking across the spine.”
This is still a very serious problem and has led to more of our custodial staff’s time having to be devoted to cleaning up this mess.
“I would say that there’s no increased costs in picking up cigarette butts, [but] it’s distraction on workload,” said Liz Praetorius, vice president of Finance and Administration. “You have a certain amount of hours of labor force. It’s no additional cost — it’s not like we’ve hired new staff to pick up cigarette butts, but if you’re not picking up cigarette butts, you could be working on something else.”
Although there is obviously an increased need to clean up these cigarette butts, Mark Delcamp, the assistant director of Facility Services-Custodial, does not feel it’s that serious of an increase in cleanup.
“The cigarette butts are more visible in certain areas of campus, and we are spending time to pick them up, but I honestly don’t think it is much more worse than before. People still littered them all over before we became tobacco-free,” said Delcamp.
Another item that Delcamp mentioned was that, despite the need to clean up more cigarettes, it’s not that serious since the custodial staff “zone clean” areas and would find the garbage anyways.
Before the campus was Tobacco-Free, it had 75 cigarette butt holders outside of the buildings. There were two kinds of these holders — a smaller one and a larger one. The smaller one could hold anywhere from 100-150 cigarettes and the larger one could hold anywhere from 300-400 cigarettes, according to Delcamp.
Delcamp mentioned that the smaller ones were cleaned roughly once a week depending on their location and the larger ones were cleaned roughly once a month. He mentioned that it cost approximately $50-75 to annually clean these holders. To clean up all of the holders could cost anywhere from $3750-5,625.
Also, it used to be an easier process to just empty the holders and clean up the cigarettes. Delcamp mentioned that the holders would be scrubbed down and rinsed with a hose or placed into a water basin and cleaned more thoroughly.
Some believe that by installing these holders outside the buildings it will solve the issue of these cigarettes being littered across campus. Delcamp mentioned that before Tobacco-Free, there were still cigarettes littered across campus despite the butt holders being around the building.
Horvath said that putting back the cigarette butt holders would give a “conflicting message,” and may defeat the purpose of being tobacco-free. She also mentioned that it would cost more to put the cigarette butt holders back then it did to take them out.
Horvath is even mentioning at orientations that Fredonia is tobacco-free to help new students be aware of this policy. Despite all of the problems and costs associated with tobacco-free, the University remains dedicated to maintaining it for the welfare of the students.
Fredonia has even received an “A+” rating from the American Cancer Society for its Tobacco-Free Policy.
“The University continues to take a position that it’s important for the campus community to have a healthy environment,” said Praetorius, “and we continue to focus on promoting that by offering some of the things that we do, like the yoga events [and] things like that, so that there are other things for you to do besides smoke.”