The price of cigarettes across San Francisco is set to increase on January 1, as the City Controller has announced a planned doubling of the so-called cigarette litter fee. The fee, first implemented in late 2009, added a 20 cent charge to all packs of smokes sold in San Francisco with the goal of helping to defray costs associated with cleaning up cigarette butts.
The new fee will be 40 cents per pack.
City Controller Ben Rosenfield announced the increase in a memo to the Board of Supervisors, reports the Examiner. The 2009 legislation approving the original fee entitles him to make the decision unilaterally.
Rosenfield apparently had the authority to increase the fee all the way up to 84 cents, but thought better of it.
“Setting the fee at the permissible level of 84 cents per pack would result in a 400 percent increase from the current fee level of 20 cents per pack,” the paper quotes his memo as reading. “In order to reduce the volatility of the fee level, the Controller’s Office is limiting the fee increase to 40 cents per pack, an increase of 100 percent.”
At the time of the initial fee implementation, then Mayor Gavin Newsom told the New York Times that he hoped the fee would have an impact beyond funding street cleaning.
“In general, fees help reduce the consumption and use of tobacco,” explained Newsom. “And we think that will have a very beneficial public health component.”
Newsom went on to point out that a 2009 "litter audit" found that cigarettes made up nearly 25 percent of trash found in public spaces.
So has the fee helped to keep cigarette trash out of public spaces? Well, maybe. The Examiner highlights a 2014 study which found "53 percent of litter consisted of tobacco-related litter." However, "[the] primary reason for this difference was that the sites were substantially cleaner in 2014 (with a total of 3,881 individual pieces of litter) than they were in 2009 (with 12,123 individual pieces of litter).”
The spot with the most litter in the 2014 study? Folsom at 20th Street.
So smoke up, smokers of San Francisco! Just please remember to put those butts in the trash when you're done (thanks!).
