Cigarettes will cost more starting from October in San Francisco

Published on October 12, 2009 6:36 AM

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Beginning with October 1, 2009, Smokers will get a new stimulus to give up, as the price per pack of smokes in San Francisco will grow by 20 cents. The collected revenue from the hike called The City Fee will be used for scavenging cigarette butts discarded by smokers in the playgrounds, streets, parks and other places, said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

In the beginning of 2009 smokers had to fork up 87 cents to the state coffin for each cigarette pack they had purchased. That sum rose to $1.01 after the federal tax increase went into effect in April. Premium brands are selling for as much as $7 across Sun Francisco. Last year, the sales of cigarettes in the city totaled 30.6 million packs.

Gavin Newsom initially introduced a 33-cent tax, but decided to decrease that fee to 20 cents as a thorough research demonstrated that the expenses on cleaning the city streets from the cigarette litter were lower than it had been estimated earlier. According to the San Francisco Ways and Means Committee report, the city spends an average of $7.5 million each year on cleanup of litter.

However, cigarette shop owners as well as smokers aren’t delighted even with that lower price rise. Some of them stated that it is up to the tobacco companies to establish prices, and not the government, while retailers are afraid that local smokers will drive outside of the city to buy cigarettes, and their revenues would definitely go down because of another tax increase. “It is bad. We will certainly be hit by the added fee,” complained Shelly Myers, 28, the owner of Blue Road Tobacco near the downtown. She said that many customers who were not informed about the price increase will blame business owners for it instead of municipal authorities.

But it was not a valid reason for The Board of Supervisors, which unanimously voted in favor of the new fee back in July in order to help the City to reduce one of the most severe money deficiencies in its history.

The Mayor told the Los Angeles Times reporter Newsom that California occupies 32nd place in the list of states with the highest cigarette taxes, whereas the last tax hike was more than 10 years ago, in 1998. “The bottom line is that the majority of taxpayers would not be bothered with that fee, what is reasonable, since cigarette litter makes up the biggest part of all trash on the streets of San Francisco.

In conformity with state legislation, municipal authorities are not empowered to levy tobacco taxes; however, they can impose a fee to offset expenses on the litter cleaning.

San Francisco Mayor said he also planning to introduce another fee, charging wholesalers of soft sugary drinks like soda, because recent researches demonstrated that such beverages trigger obesity-related illnesses which result in increased expenses on health care.