photo by: Chris Conde

Lawrence City Hall is pictured in September 2018.

A variety of tobacco issues will soon be before City of Lawrence leaders after being absent for more than a year.

The Lawrence City Commission at its Oct. 18 meeting is set to discuss a number of tobacco-related items, including vaping, Tobacco 21 — the federal law raising the legal age for the sale of tobacco products from 18 to 21 — and tobacco retail licensing.

Kari Rinker, the American Heart Association’s state government relations director for Kansas, told the Journal-World that local measures related to tobacco retail licensing were ultimately intended to reduce youth access to tobacco products by holding retailers accountable for underage sales.

The conversation around curbing tobacco use through such proposals has been ongoing but without much action. Rinker said that she has been working primarily with LiveWell Douglas County, a health coalition coordinated by Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, and the health department itself since before September 2021, the last time tobacco-related issues appeared on a Lawrence City Commission agenda.

But Tobacco 21 has been popping up on agendas for various organizations and local governmental bodies since 2018, she said, when it appeared on a Lawrence-Douglas County Health Board agenda.

“This has been truly an effort that’s been ongoing for quite some time now,” Rinker said. “And it shows the maddeningly slow pace that local policy influencing can take, right?”

Tobacco retail licensing

Tobacco retail licensing is one effective way to curb tobacco use, according to public health agencies like the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. A February KDHE report about licensing and zoning in Kansas says that requiring a license lets a locality know exactly who is selling tobacco products in its jurisdiction, which in turn can help the local government enact and enforce policies that help prevent young people from ever starting to use tobacco.

Any such measure would need to take the form of an ordinance approved by the City Commission, and it would typically establish a new licensing fee for retailers selling tobacco products. An ordinance could also require those retailers to pass compliance checks.

Both the fees and compliance checks would be administered by the health department. Rinker said rather than using volunteers, which is typical for compliance checks in other communities, the health department here plans to propose paying participants in the 18-21 age range to conduct the checks.

Vicki Collie-Akers, the health department’s interim director of policy and planning, confirmed that arrangement to the Journal-World Tuesday afternoon.

If Lawrence ever adopts a retail license ordinance, it would be just the third community in Kansas to do so. Wichita, the first, has had an ordinance on the books since the 1990s. Newton, about 25 miles north of Wichita, was the second, in 2019.

“… And Lawrence’s would be the only one within the state to utilize best practice, which is having that housed within the health department itself, rather than having police or other entities do these compliance checks and things of that nature,” Rinker said. “This is, at the end of the day, a health ordinance, so it’s really a wonderful partnership that the city can have with the health department, who is willing to do the compliance checks and manage the licensing as well as the fines for breaking the law.”

Tobacco 21

T21 has been a federal law since 2019, but Kansas’ state law has yet to be changed to reflect that. Though federal law takes precedence, the minimum purchasing age for tobacco according to state law in Kansas is actually still codified as 18.

A number of communities in Kansas — the majority of them concentrated in nearby Johnson County — have passed local T21 regulations. That includes Douglas County, but only its rural unincorporated areas. For the communities in Kansas that have already established local laws, some have also elected to include exemptions or amend smoking restrictions.

A local version of T21 is mostly just needed as a technical change, Rinker said, but passing an ordinance at the municipal level would also allow a community like Lawrence to uphold the federal law in a way the state hasn’t yet proceeded on. In part, that’s because it would set further precedent for enforcing a tobacco retail licensing policy locally.

“We’re hoping that we’ll see more communities adopt this after Lawrence,” Rinker said. “… I’m hoping we create the same kind of local policy awareness in other communities throughout the state of Kansas, beyond even these larger metro areas, similar to what we saw with the original T21.”

Vaping

Vaping, broadly speaking, ties into both tobacco retail licensing and T21 policies. Retailer standards can cover not just tobacco products but also electronic smoking devices.

Allison Koonce, the chair of LiveWell Douglas County’s tobacco-free living work group, told the Journal-World that according to a 2020 Kansas Communities that Care survey, 15.79% of Douglas County youth described it as “very easy” to obtain vaping products. That was nearly 2% higher than the state average of 13.97%.

“We want to reduce that youth access to tobacco and vape products,” Koonce said.

The last time commissioners talked about tobacco-related issues in 2021, LiveWell presented to the group. That presentation noted that vapes and e-cigarettes are the tobacco product of choice for youths according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with roughly one out of five vaping.

Other statistics from that presentation note that vaping was acting as a pipeline to other types of tobacco use for young people; youths who had ever used e-cigarettes in 2018 were eight times more likely to be using cigarettes a year later.

Koonce said LiveWell is hoping to continue educating the City Commission about best practices and what’s been successful in other cities in Kansas, and LiveWell is planning on being at the Oct. 18 meeting as a resource for commissioners again.

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It’s hard to say why items like these haven’t advanced much at the local level, Rinker said, but it may have something to do with city commissioner turnover. Depending on how many votes they earn, city commissioners in Lawrence may either be elected to a four-year or a two-year term. She noted that she’s had conversations with all of the current commissioners about the topic, though.

One of those commissioners, Brad Finkeldei, said the ideas Rinker is lobbying for have been on the table since he first joined the commission in 2019. Finkeldei said he recalled there being some questions when tobacco retail licensing first came up about who would handle licensing and enforcing the ordinance.

What he doesn’t remember, though, is hearing any pushback from retailers last year when the commission discussed licensing. Finkeldei said he didn’t anticipate pushback this time around either, as long as any cost isn’t incredibly high or burdensome.

Generally, Finkeldei said that since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, he has seen a renewed community focus on health. There’s a lot of momentum toward making the community healthier, he said, and the back and forth so far has been largely so the health department could work out how that would look.

“I think that’s what we’re going to see on the 18th,” Finkeldei said. “(The health department) is going to bring it back to us, and we’ll see exactly what it looks like and better understand the mechanics of that, and then really hear from the public on their thoughts on that sort of regulation here in our community.”