- May 8, 2024
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Former Flagler Beach Commissioner Ken Bryan and five volunteers installed the city's new 'no smoking' signs. Photo by Sierra Williams
Sixty 'no smoking' signs were donated to Flagler Beach for its beach, boardwalk and parks by Tobacco Free Florida. Photo by Sierra Williams
The cigarette butts collected out of the cigarette receptacles from the Flagler Beach boardwalk as they were removed on June 29. Photo courtesy of Ken Bryan
Sixty 'no smoking' signs were donated to Flagler Beach for its beach, boardwalk and parks by Tobacco Free Florida. Photo by Sierra Williams
Former Flagler Beach Commissioner Ken Bryan said he bought specialized screws to prevent the signs from being removed. Photo by Sierra Williams
Less than a week after the Flagler Beach City Commission approved them, former commissioner Ken Bryan has installed “no smoking” signs along the city’s boardwalk and at city-owned parks.
The signs were donated by the Flagler County chapter of Tobacco Free Florida, Bryan said. He asked the City Commission at its June 22 meeting to install the donated signs and received a unanimous consensus.
Bryan and a few community volunteers met at the Flagler Beach Pier at 7:30 a.m. June 29 to begin installing the signs ahead of the Fourth of July crowds.
“We’re going to try to do the education part of it first,” he said, “to see if people do the right thing.”
Bryan said the signs are meant to educate the public. It is difficult to enforce an ordinance that people don’t know about.
The city passed the ordinance, which bans smoking on the beach and at city-owned parks, in September 2022. Unfiltered cigars are the only exception to the ordinance.
There are 60 signs in total. Twenty are flags that the city lifeguards will place on the beach each day, and the other 40 are aluminum “no smoking” signs for the boardwalk and city-owned parks, Bryan said.
He said he bought special, tamper-resistant screws that require a specialized bit to install the signs. Hopefully, he said, that will keep some people from removing the signs with screwdrivers.
That’s what happened to the cigarette butt receptacles installed for two years along the boardwalk, Bryan said. The city has had to replace around 15 of them, he said, because people pulled them off and, in some cases, removed the aluminum container inside.
But now those receptacles are being removed entirely, to be replaced with the signs.
“It’s to avoid mixed messages,” Bryan said. “The idea is to get more [signs] to replace any that get damaged or vandalized.”
The Flagler Beach Rotary Club has expressed an interest in possibly sponsoring additional signs, Bryan said. He said he is meeting with the club to go over the city’s ordinance and the campaign to educate the public on it.
Flagler Beach resident Tom Wotherspoon said he worked with Bryan to install the cigarette receptacles two years ago. When Bryan said he needed help installing signs, Wotherspoon said he was happy to help.
He said he thinks people would be a little more conscious of cigarette litter if they knew what a problem cigarette butts were.
“I think people think the cigarettes degrade easy, but they don’t,” Wotherspoon said.
Terry Williams, the program manager for Tobacco Free Flagler, said education about the importance of these ordinances is key.
“Cigarettes are the most littered item that there is,” she said. “I’ve been cleaning these beaches for years with my students.”
Williams said smoke-free ordinances like Flagler Beach’s are important to protect against second-hand smoke as well as litter. When she heard Flagler Beach needed signs to help enforce its ordinance, she used around $2,000 of a Tobacco Free Florida grant to help, she said.
Williams said she is meeting with local county officials about the possibility of bringing a similar ordinance to Flagler County’s parks and is working to get a meeting with Palm Coast to do the same.
Neither Palm Coast nor Flagler County has ordinances designating parks as smoke-free.
Brittany Kershaw, Palm Coast’s director of Communications and Marketing, wrote in an email that while the city does not have an ordinance, the “park rules” signs at city parks do prohibit smoking and vaping.
Williams said signage doesn’t mean much without an enforceable ordinance behind it.
“It would be very difficult to, you know, cite anybody,” she said. “I don’t know how [that] could be enforced. I’d like to see them pass a policy is what I would like to see them do.”
