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Q&A
Tobacco and e-cigarette enforcement strategies and their effectiveness
1:13:27
ยท
134 sec
Council Member Julie Menin inquires about DCWP's strategies for tobacco and e-cigarette enforcement and their effectiveness. Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga and Michael Tiger provide details on their enforcement efforts and results.
- DCWP conducted over 27,000 inspections of tobacco and e-cigarette retailers in 2024
- The agency has shut down over 170 locations for unlicensed activity
- DCWP has increased enforcement ceilings to discourage prolonged non-compliance
- The agency encourages public reporting of potential violations to guide inspector deployment
Julie Menin
1:13:27
Great.
1:13:28
Thank you.
1:13:28
Now, getting back to tobacco, and we talked about this at the top of the hearing, the improvement in compliance, which is great to see, is attributed to obviously increased enforcement and educational efforts.
1:13:39
So, what strategies specifically has the agency implemented regarding education and improved compliance?
1:13:47
And do you believe additional enforcement would improve this data?
Vilda Vera Mayuga
1:14:08
Chair, yeah, tobacco is definitely it's consistently the number one area where we get complaints and high number of inspections that we conduct and also where where the the amount of money that we collect for the violations is definitely stay there.
1:14:26
I know that in 2024, we conducted over 27,000 inspections of tobacco and e cigarette retailers across the city, and so we continue to encourage individuals and, of course, all of you to let us know when you observe what you believe may be a violation so that we can deploy our inspectors to make sure that they can check how many.
1:14:49
Can also share that I know under my tenure, we've also shut down over 170 locations for unlicensed activity because that is also even higher, violations in terms of the tobacco and e cigarettes, just the unlicensed activity versus those who may be licensed where we are aware of them, obviously, because we license them, but we're always looking to proactively make sure that we are visiting all the businesses in a route for an inspector as as they see it that they might not have been aware.
Michael Tiger
1:15:22
No.
1:15:22
Was just gonna underscore, like, the we really made a conscious decision to increase our ceilings, and I think that, hopefully, aside from, you know, what the results are for those individual targets, hopefully have knock on effects to the entire community that they realize that there is a real cost to prolong noncompliance.