Clarification: Cooperstown Smoking Ban

During a recent Cooperstown Board of Trustees meeting, a ban on smoking on Main Street Cooperstown was passed.

“We’ve been talking about the smoking ban for a year. What are we going to do if we allow marijuana shops, how can we keep people from smoking on Main Street and the whole street smelling like marijuana?” Trustee Richard Sternberg said. “We couldn’t just single out smoking marijuana. We set a public hearing, we had the public hearing and it became clear that there were some potential loopholes in the law that we needed to close,” Sternberg said.

“We realized that all smoking products need to be treated equally. You can’t make laws more restrictive than what you present at a public hearing. They can only be less restrictive. So now we go back and rewrite things, it goes to committee, then it comes back to the board, the board calls for a public hearing, then it’s voted on. This is a multi-month process,” he said.

“I suggested that we go ahead and pass what we have then come back to the drawing board to see where things needed to be tightened up. We realized we needed to define what “Main Street” means. Is it the actual street, or is it the street and sidewalks? The grassy areas? This is what we will be working on over the coming weeks,” Sternberg said.