By Philip Sean Curran
Staff Writer
Cranbury officials will look to widen a ban on public smoking in the community, as one official is pushing the town to get ahead of the state legalizing recreational marijuana.
Township Committeeman Daniel P. Mulligan III suggested this week, and other officials agreed, to ask the municipal Board of Health to expand current regulations on outdoor smoking, now limited to municipally owned parks, to encompass all parks in the community, open space and all other municipally owned property.
Mulligan also proposed another change to make Cranbury police, not the health officer, be responsible for enforcing the law. The town has an agreement with Middlesex County to provide a health officer, Natalie Bujalski.
“She handles a lot of towns, so she’s not here every day, all day,” Administrator Denise Marabello said on Nov. 5 at the Township Committee meeting, where the smoking issue came up.
Mulligan, speaking at the meeting, expressed concern about seeing people smoking marijuana “openly” in parts of the country he has visited, with recreational marijuana becoming more prevalent.
“I just don’t think that’s something we want in our town,” said Mulligan, who voted earlier in the year with the rest of the governing body to ban the sale of recreational marijuana in the township.
The sale is prohibited already, but officials wanted to stay a step ahead of any changes that come out of Trenton, where Gov. Phil Murphy favors legalizing marijuana.
Mulligan said he had a “lack of faith” in how lawmakers would draft legislation to make New Jersey the latest state in the nation to go in that direction. He noted New Jersey could be the first state with designated places, akin to smoke shops, where marijuana users can go.
“I would like to see us get ahead of this (and) have it in place to protect our citizens because I just don’t know how this law is going to turn out,” Mulligan said. “I’m very concerned.”
Mulligan initially suggested that the smoking ban apply to within 35 feet of a public property, although he dropped that part of his request.
During the committee’s discussion, Mayor Glenn R. Johnson suggested being specific about which open land officials want to include in the restriction, noting that the town leases out farmland it owns.
“If some farmer is on a tractor, he wants to smoke a cigarette, I don’t think that’s the kind of the thing we want a police officer or the health officer to go out and check out,” he said.
Last year, officials enacted the smoking ban, limited to municipal parks, with fines starting at $250 and going all the way up to $1,000. Enforcement of the measure was left to the health officer or the Board of Health, according to the ordinance.
In explaining that decision, Johnson said “we didn’t want police officers to be pulled off patrol because somebody called the cops about a guy smoking a cigarette in a park.”
The Board of Health has the power to adopt ordinances, with Mulligan adding the board would have to decide to take up the issue. The board has one more meeting this year, scheduled for Dec. 3, so action would have to wait until 2019.
Later in the meeting, Mulligan floated the idea of expanding the smoking ban to other parts of Cranbury and cited how officials in South Jersey, Gloucester City, had banned smoking in the business district. The prohibition there was approved four years ago.
“Out on Main Street, you can smoke a cigarette, which the next phase is what else can you be smoking on Main Street?” Mulligan said.
The governing body showed no interest in doing anything similar.
“I’m less enthusiastic about that,” Township Committeeman Matthew A. Scott said.
