Another Mount Vernon City Council meeting, another reminder on the importance of all members being present for votes.
We have no issues with the stance taken by council member Mark Andresen. On the contrary, he explained his vote and made it. That two other council members were not in attendance at the same meeting so the majority of votes would carry for an ordinance is its own issue.
But he is correct that when the council originally took measures in April against vape and smoke shops, it was doing so in clearly more uncertain times. In the span of six months, two similar shops showed up in the uptown, one of them almost overnight after the 2023 election. There were no rules to limit said shops in the community, and shop space available.
We get the efforts of Wellness Coalition of Rural Linn County and Mount Vernon city attorney as well to better define who can enter those establishments. When vapes f irst appeared on the scene in the early 2000s, there was no one paying attention to who was shopping for these electronic cigarettes and the canisters, and slowly a health epidemic arose among youth and teens who were somehow impacted by the products. There’s a great documentary on Netflix “The Rise and Fall of Juul” about how the advertising, promotion and sales of these devices were targeted to children or when that was discovered, pivots were not quickly done.
We have no problem with adults making decisions that impact their long-term health, like smoking does. But as a society we do what we can to help teens put off those decisions until their adulthood, especially when the products contain addictive materials.
We also agree with Andresen that the laws pertaining to many of these shops changed in this past legislative session which will already make business hard enough for them moving forward.