To: The Riverside Village Board Trustees
The following is on the Agenda for June 4, 2007
Subject: A Motion By the Parks & Recreation Board Recommending The Village of Riverside Trustees Consider A Smoking Ban In All Parks Under The Jurisdiction Of The Parks & Recreation Board
The Village has an Ordinance governing smoking. It also has rules about fishing and picnicking in the parks. The latter are not enforced and the former won't be either. This is just a further step by the Parks and Rec Board to control spaces that in all likelihood should not be under its control.
I have no quarrel with an ordinance that prohibits smoking where there are other people or children are playing. I live next to Hauser school where ball games occur often, and I see people who are presumably parents wander a little way off for a smoke without being told to or having signs plastered all over. Same at the Big Ball Park or Indian Gardens. This seems like it is a non-issue.
Extending this smoking ban “to all parks and open spaces “ under the control of the Parks and Rec Commission - or whatever the current version reads - is an overzealous and injudicious extension of the intent and goal of the ban. Let's just look at one area - the Swan Pond. Why the Park and Rec Board and not the LAC controls this space is anyone's guess. This is a beautiful, natural area that should forever remain uncluttered with any more paraphernalia or signs, and there is absolutely no need to give the Rec Commission suzerainty over it any way.
What possible objection can anyone have to someone like, for example, myself - who is in that area at least once a day, (usually picking up trash) walking alone with my dog and smoking my cigar? Only a zealot embarked on some misguided crusade would extend this ban to places like that when there are no children or organized events in the vicinity. And to put yet another unenforceable rule on the books is both stupid and harmful because it just creates more burden for those who are supposed to enforce it.
I ask you to use common sense: we have a smoking ordinance that does not need to be extended. It already accomplishes what it was meant to do. I urge you not to start handing over new tasks or powers to commissions ill-equipped to cope with them, and not to disenfranchise other residents. Thank you.
Donald Spatny