The American Lung Association of CA, Superior Branch, was a recent victim of State budget cuts and will be saying goodbye to Health Educators Kristin Walburn and Guadalupe Carrillo. We will however retain one of our Tobacco Control Section grants. Services that the ALA will be able to offer this year include:

A website registry to link up rental property owners with smoke-free properties with individuals looking for a smoke-free place to live. The registry covers Butte, Glenn, Tehama, Colusa, Shasta and Yuba counties and will be heavily promoted throughout the area. You can access the website at www.smokefreehousing.org.

Continued education and enforcement assistance for California State University at Chico’s new policy that restricts smoking 25’ from all building doorways, windows, breezeways, and awnings.

Continued education and recruitment of Chico’s downtown bars to the ALA’s BEATs (Beware We Are Tobacco’s Victims) program. The BEATs program encourages and rewards college bars that sign a policy that prohibits the tobacco industry from marketing to the bars’ college student customers: a particularly insidious marketing ploy of the tobacco industry that is cited as a main reason for the huge rise in smoking among 18 – 24 year-olds.