Smoke Shop Regs Signed Into Law

Mayor Justin Elicker put pen to paper at a City Hall signing ceremony that could lead to $1,000-a-day fines for rule-breaking smoke shops — as part of new local regulations governing where and how retailers can sell tobacco and vaping products in New Haven.

The mayor signed those new bills into law Thursday morning at the end of a press conference held on the second floor of City Hall.

Alongside city Health Director Maritza Bond, City Plan Director Laura Brown, Assistant Police Chief Bert Ettienne, and Alders Richard Furlow, Eli Sabin, and Frankie Redente, among others, Elicker signed two new smoke-shop-focused laws that the Board of Alders passed on Monday.

The first is a zoning ordinance amendment that imposes distance requirements prohibiting new retailers of tobacco or vapor products from opening within 1,000 feet of schools, places of worship, or public parks, and within 3,000 feet of existing such retailers. The new zoning law also includes restrictions on lighting displays at these shops, as well as on how they advertise their smoking wares. 

The second creates a new municipal license program, to be run by the city’s Health Department, which requires New Haven tobacco and vaping vendors to get local licenses — at a cost of $150 per year — starting this October. Smoke shops that don’t receive such licenses or that otherwise violate the city’s new tobacco-and-vape-retail rules could face local fines ranging from $150 to $1,000 per day, depending on the frequency of the offenses.

The new rules apply to more than just smoke shops like Grand Asmoke Shop (pictured at the top of this story). They also apply to corner stores, gas stations, and other tobacco vendors. The new zoning rules differentiate between three categories of business: ​“retailers of tobacco or vapor products,” which include any retailers whose business ​“involves” the sale of smoking products and paraphernalia; ​“smoke shops,” which include any retailers ​“dedicated” to selling smoking products and paraphernalia; and ​“smoking places,” which sell smoking products for on-site consumption, like hookah and cigar lounges. 

Time and again during Thursday’s ceremony, speakers hailed the new local regulations as promoting public health at a time when smoke shops have proliferated across New Haven. Elicker and Bond said there are currently 212 such tobacco vendors operating in New Haven.

“We don’t need any more of these shops,” Elicker said, noting that — with the zoning law’s distance requirements — there is effectively only one ​“small portion of the city,” on an industrial stretch of Water Street, where a new smoke shop could open. (That could change when, for example, existing smoke shops close, thereby rejiggering the map of allowable locations based on the 3,000-foot-distance rule.)

Elicker said that tobacco kills more than 490,000 people in the U.S. every year. ​“It’s the leading cause of preventable death in the United States,” and especially addictive for those who start smoking while still young.

“People can do business in our community,” he said, ​“but you have to follow the rules.”

“This is about protecting public health and the safety and welfare of our youth,” Bond said.

She said her department will be hosting webinars and undertaking other education efforts for existing retailers to get the word out about the new licensure program in advance of its Oct. 1 start date. After that, she said, the local Health Department will undertake annual ​“compliance checks” to make sure local smoke shops are following the rules — around having and prominently displaying a local license, around complying with the zoning ordinance’s lighting and marketing requirements, around not selling tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21.

Bond said that this local law empowers the city’s Health Department to enlist 18- to 20-year-olds to help determine if smoke shops are indeed following these rules. She said the state, which already licenses and regulates tobacco vendors across Connecticut, already has the power to work with 18- to 20-year-olds to ensure shops aren’t engaging in underage tobacco sales. (To quote from the relevant portion of the new local licensing law: ​“The New Haven Health Department may conduct unannounced compliance checks and may engage persons between the ages of eighteen (18) and twenty (20) to enter licensed premises to attempt to purchase tobacco and smoking products.”)

Furlow, Sabin, and Redente said that these new regulations are the alders’ and the city’s response to concerns expressed by residents across New Haven about all the smoke shops that have opened up around town.

“We had no [zoning] regulations for smoke shops” before these laws, Furlow said. And now New Haven does.

Why does New Haven need its own tobacco licensure program when the state already has such a regulatory program?

“It’s a capacity issue,” Bond said. The state sends out inspectors just every 18 months. The local Health Department will do annual compliance checks — and will look out not just for licenses, but also whether or not these shops are following, for example, the new lighting and advertising rules.

Click here and here to read the two newly approved laws in full.

Out at 229 Grand Ave. Thursday afternoon, at the aptly named Grand Asmoke Shop, the man working behind the plexiglassed-partioned counter — who did not provide his name — had little to say about the new city smoke shop regs. He said the owner handles all the license requirements, and that he wasn’t in at the time. After taking a photo of the interior of the shop, the man behind the counter said, ​“I need you to leave.”