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BOH minutes 102298
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BOH minutes 102298
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BOCC
Date
10/22/1998
Meeting Type
Regular Meeting
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Advisory Bd. Minutes
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MINUTES <br />ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF HEALTH <br />October 22, 1998 <br /> <br />Board of Health Minutes <br />Transcription completed by Patsy L. Bateman 5 October 22, 1998 <br />what the State law says. Example: If we were going to clean up an ordinance to take out <br />offending provisions, the way we would clean them up would be to make them conform to what <br />the State law says. That’s the big picture I have of how that could be done. One of the things <br />we don’t know is whether the Board of Health has the power to adopt smoking rules at all. That <br />question wasn’t touched in the Halifax County case. The Halifax County court decision said that <br />the set of rules they were looking at didn’t make the grade because they took economic impact, <br />not just health effects into consideration and threw those rules out without deciding to question <br />the power of the Board of Health to make rules. There were arguments made in that case <br />throughout the litigation process that the Board of Health rule making power doesn’t extend to <br />economic decisions. Those are some of the same arguments being made in Chatham County <br />in context of the hog waste rules. If you do any kind of serious enforcement, you run the risk of <br />somebody saying Boards of Health don’t have the power to do this. The other thing is if you <br />tinker with the set of rules you already have, you also run some risk of somebody saying, “You <br />tinkered with them, therefore you’ve lost what you had”. Probably the final idea would be that if <br />you were to amend the rules to clean up some of the problems that we know are in our rules as <br />a result of the Halifax County Rules decision, then you might be in the best position of all to <br />begin some kind of rigorous enforcement. There are a couple of things that Rosie has talked <br />about that might cause difficulty if a court challenge were to be initiated. The Halifax County <br />Rules failed principally because they were deemed to be not health rules but more like the kind <br />of laws that an elected government might have and that they balanced health and economics, <br />which is something that county commissioners and town council people do all the time. The <br />Halifax County Rules balance that by excluding certain things from their coverage. The <br />exclusions we have [Orange County Smoking Rules] are private clubs, federal facilities, tobacco <br />shops and jails. I think the only one that runs a risk of running a foul of the Halifax rules <br />decision is probably the tobacco shop exclusion. Excluding private clubs is probably something <br />we would have to do anyway, it would be the same as excluding your home. I doubt the Board <br />of Health has the power to say nobody can smoke at home. I doubt they can say that nobody <br />can smoke in my private club. Federal facilities are excluded because you don’t have the power <br />to regulate federal facilities, so excluding those doesn’t do anything but rectify the obvious. <br />Local governments can’t regulate federal facilities. Tobacco shops is the one vulnerable area <br />as it is the only place where economics probably entered into the decision of the Board of <br />Health. If you were to change the rules to make them applicable to tobacco shops, according to <br />State rules, nothing would happen to the tobacco shop. It isn’t big enough to make a difference. <br /> There isn’t a lot of risk in cleaning up this tobacco shop thing. Even though it is causing some <br />confusion, I would leave these date provisions that no longer apply in the regulations. There is <br />some concern that in removing them, someone would say you need to change those sections in <br />a way that conforms with State law and you don’t want to do that. Leave it alone and deal with <br />it. The answer to the jail is that exempting the jails and confinement facilities is not an economic <br />decision. Here you would be balancing other health issues. Requiring jails to be smoke-free is <br />running the risk of having a jail uprising. It’s possible to make our jail smoke free. Klein -- The <br />Orange County Jail has gone smoke free, this is new, when the new addition was put on. <br />Gledhill -- The reason this was done probably had nothing to do with economics and you can <br />leave that alone. If you change it, the only way I think you can change it would be to again <br />make it conform to the State rules and I think it’s better off left alone and let Lindy Pendergrass <br />manage the jail. Fixing tobacco shops eliminates the only economic decision you made in the <br />rules. The State has said that we probably have the best set of rules in the book right now. <br /> <br />The motion to proceed with the amendments to the rules regarding tobacco shops was <br />made by Jonathan Klein, seconded by Brenda Crowder-Gaines and carried without <br />dissent.
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