Going Local

In December 1980, a month after losing the Proposition 10 election, Loveday, Hanauer, Glantz, Weisberg, and Chuck Mawson (a volunteer

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who had kept an industry “look-alike” bill bottled up in the state legislature during the Proposition 10 fight) got together in Hanauer's living room in the Berkeley hills to decide what to do next. After suffering their second defeat in a statewide initiative, they decided that it was time to change tactics. The Legislature was clearly under the thumb of the tobacco industry and, while the public supported the idea of clean indoor air, the nonsmokers' rights advocates recognized that they could not raise the money needed to counter effectively the tobacco industry's advertising campaigns against a state initiative. On the other hand, they knew from both polling and personal experience that the public supported clean indoor air.

They decided to work on local ordinances because the one clear success they could point to was the Berkeley local clean indoor air ordinance. They decided to focus the limited resources of the nonsmokers' rights advocates on one community at a time. They reasoned that, while the tobacco industry would almost certainly oppose every ordinance, their campaign contributions, lobbyists, and massive advertising campaigns would not work as effectively as well-organized residents who knew the members of the city council and favored the ordinance. To raise money, advocates decided to use the mailing list that had been developed during the campaigns for Propositions 5 and 10. Ray Weisberg promised to seek seed money from the American Cancer Society, and Chuck Mawson quit his job as a computer salesman to work full time on the effort, together with the campaign's part-time bookkeeper, Bobbie Jacobson. The campaign organization was renamed Californians for Nonsmokers' Rights (CNR), and the nonsmokers' rights movement entered a new phase.

Seven months later, on July 15, 1981, the first local clean indoor air ordinance was enacted when the city council of Ukiah, a small town 150 miles north of San Francisco, adopted an ordinance that was essentially identical to Proposition 10. Over the next three years, CNR continued to identify and work with local activists throughout California, and by May 1983 twenty-one cities or counties had passed local clean indoor air ordinances. CNR's local ordinance strategy was working.