Ventura County OK Likely : New Deputies May Face Smoking Ban

A two-year contract that would require all Ventura County Sheriff’s Department deputies, investigators and sergeants hired after June to be nonsmokers--both on and off duty--appears very likely to be adopted by the Board of Supervisors next week.

If the contract is approved next Tuesday as expected, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department would become perhaps the first sheriff’s department in California to ban the hiring of smokers, authorities said.

Although officials said they did not know of any other law enforcement agencies in the state that, 24 hours a day, prohibit employees’ smoking, they pointed to at least a half dozen fire departments in Southern California with similar policies, including the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

The contract, which received tentative approval by the Board of Supervisors last week, met little opposition in the 550-member Ventura County Sheriff’s Assn., the union for deputies, sergeants and district attorney’s investigators, said senior deputy Gary White, the union’s representative.

In a vote last Wednesday by 69% of the union’s members, 90% of the ballots favored the agreement, White said.

The provision does not affect smokers now employed by the department. According to a county-conducted survey, 20% of county employees smoke.

May Save Money

The policy is designed to save the county money by cutting health care and pension expenditures, which could amount to as much as $5,000 more annually for a smoker than for a nonsmoker, said Ron Komers, director of the county’s Personnel Department.

“It makes good fiscal sense,” said Madge Schaefer, a Ventura County supervisor. “When it comes to spending taxpayers’ money, we’ve got to cut the best deal possible.”

The new contract also will increase salaries by 16% to 17% over a 28-month retroactive period that ends in July, 1990, White said. In addition to banning smoking, the county will develop a set of physical fitness standards that all sheriff’s deputies will have to meet or face a 5% salary cut, Komers said.

New deputies will be required to sign an agreement each year stating that they will comply with the no-smoking policy, Komers said. “If they smoke after they have agreed not to, they are subject to termination,” he said.

White said: “We’ll just have to wait and see if it has a negative impact on recruiting. The pool of applicants is decreasing, and competition is tough.”

A representative of the Tobacco Institute, a Washington-based trade association for American manufacturers of tobacco products, criticized the measure as an infringement on personal freedom.

“I think from the standpoint of privacy rights, it’s a terrible idea,” said Walker Merryman. “I suppose they could then tell officers that they could not drink liquor, they could not eat foods with a high salt content. There are a number of extensions that this kind of law could take.”

County Could Lead the Way

Spokesmen of groups that represent law enforcement agencies in California said they believe the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department would be the first in the state to ban the hiring of smokers.

“It’s a new development. We don’t know of any,” said Georgia Pinola, spokeswoman for the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, a state government group that oversees requirements for the selection and training of California’s 63,300 sworn officers.

Attorney Bill Williams of Employee Representation Services Inc., a Sacramento-based company that represents about 100 law enforcement agencies throughout the state in contract negotiations, said he was unaware of any other sheriff’s department in California with such a policy.

Ventura County used as its model a no-smoking hiring policy instituted by the Alexandria, Va., Police Department in 1977, that at the time was one of the first of its kind in the nation.

But that policy was rescinded in 1986 and replaced with one that allows smoking in designated areas within police buildings, because the department had “trouble with enforcement,” said spokeswoman Lucy Crockett.

“In the end, we stopped short of dismissing people for smoking,” Crockett said.