The Undergraduate Student Government Senate unanimously approved a bill Thursday night to implement smoking zones on the Tempe campus.
USG was originally set to hear a measure to ban smoking on campus, but instead decided to establish smoking zones. The bill will now go to ASU administration for review.
Courtney Roake, the mental health chair for the Health and Counseling Student Action Committee, said the group has already educated USG on the repercussions of smoking zones.
“I’m just glad that we finally have a stance from them,” Roake said. “We’ve been trying to get a vote out of them for a long time.”
Although she said the committee is done talking to USG about the bill, the group will not stop advocacy related to a smoke-free campus.
“We basically just wanted to get the opinion of the students as requested by Michael Crow, and if that’s the opinion that they came up with, then that’s one piece of the puzzle that we need to present to administration,” Roake said.
Roake said that after a previous meeting with James Rund, senior vice president of University Student Initiatives, she was under the impression the University would not consider smoking zones on campus.
“[Rund] said having smoking zones would be like having wet and dry halls,” Roake said. “[He feels] that by putting in smoking zones, you’re advocating smoking or supporting it.”
The bill was sent back to a committee during the last USG Senate meeting because its language needed to be worked out and there needed to be further investigation.
USG President Brendan O’Kelly said he wanted to see smoking zones implemented because they would provide the best compromise for smokers and non-smokers, and would allow ASU to host both lifestyles.
“A smoke-free campus policy would allow a non-smoker to enforce their lifestyle upon a smoker, just like I think that campus policy that we currently have allows a smoker to … impose their lifestyle on a non-smoker,” O’Kelly said.
The bill has been changed around several times, from a tobacco-free campus to a smoke-free campus and now to proposed smoking zones.
The bill wasn’t put to a student vote because it is a Tempe campus policy that doesn’t apply University-wide, O’Kelly said.
“I was advocating to leave the decision up to [the Senate] simply because I think it would be hard to educate the entire student body on … those issues,” he said.
Christopher Hoopes, a USG senator for the W. P. Carey School of Business and accounting senior, said there was a lot of debate over whether the bill should be a ban or a compromise with smoking zones or designated areas.
Hoopes said students in USG and the senate didn’t want to pass a bill that had different options because that also makes it more difficult for administration to make a final decision.
“We’d rather have it just be more concise,” Hoopes said.
The ASU West and Downtown campuses are currently considering a smoke-free campus policy or smoking policy in general. The Polytechnic senate voted last Friday against a bill to ban smoking on that campus.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
