WESTMINSTER, Mass. -- Defeating a proposal that would have made the town the first in the nation to ban the sale of all tobacco products, the Westminster, Mass., Board of Health voted two to one not to move forward with the proposal, according to an Associated Press report.
The vote comes about a week after rowdy opposition led board members to end a public hearing early. Westminster convenience store and other business owners strongly opposed the ban.
As reported in a 21st Century Smoke/CSP Daily News Flash, board members Ed Simoncini and Peter Munro voted to kill the proposal. Board chairperson Andrea Crete voted to keep it under consideration.
"The town is not in favor of the proposal, and therefore I am not in favor of the proposal," Simoncini said, according to a Sentinel & Enterprise report.
After the motion passed, Simoncini thanked the town's residents for their participation in the process, the newspaper said. "You made the difference," he said. "It didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked, but thank you."
Crete told The Boston Globe that she was disappointed. "We could have made Westminster tobacco-free in the sense children would have no exposure to tobacco at the stores," she said.
Crete said she regrets not doing a better job of communicating the proposal to citizens. "We didn't want to stop people from smoking in private," she said, "but unfortunately that's the way it came off."
Emotions flared at the hearing on November 12, when about 500 people crowded into a Westminster elementary school gymnasium. After shouting and clapping opponents of the ban repeatedly refused Crete's requests to come to order, she gaveled the hearing to a close just 25 minutes into it instead of taking comments. Only a handful of people were able to speak on the proposal. The police escorted the board members out, and the crowd dispersed. Crete said the board would accept written testimony until December 1 without specifying when the board would vote on the proposal.
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