Board of Health recommends licensing of tobacco retailers

The Board of Health for the city of Columbia is recommending to the city council a program to require tobacco retailers to be licensed.

In December of 2014, Columbia became the first city in Missouri to pass Tobacco 21. As of right now, Columbia has no system in place to identify retailers that sell tobacco or to monitor the retailers to see if they are in compliance with the Tobacco 21 ordinance.

According to the board, the city of Columbia has only been able to conduct six compliance checks in the last two years, out of those checks, one retailer was found in violation of the ordinance.

The board said that a significant number of retailers in Columbia are ignoring Tobacco 21 ordinance, including selling to minors under the age of 18.

The FDA currently only checks for compliance with the federal law of buying tobacco products at 18 years old. The FDA found during their checks that 8 percent of retailers in Columbia had two violations in a 12-month period and an additional 6 percent had one violation.

The board states that licensing of tobacco retailers is the first obvious step in developing a program to monitor businesses. If a business violates after five times with a 24-month period, their license to sell tobacco products should be suspended for 30 days.

Businesses could be charged a licensing fee, which would go towards CPD conducting the checks. In the past, CPD has operated those checks on a grant.

Board of Health chair Michael Szewczyk told ABC 17 News the board hopes businesses start to follow the law.

“Even though that’s the rule in Columbia, the ordinance, not everybody was following it,” Szewczyk said.

The report presented on Thursday is on the city council agenda for Monday, no action will be taken at that meeting.