The campus should look into designating a dedicated space for smoking on campus.

Currently, smoking is illegal on campus, and can be met with a fine if found out by campus police officers.

However, very few tickets are given out for smoking. Students openly smoke cigarettes near the north side of the Humanities Building, as well as the patio area near the Art B Building.

Stairs going up both ends of the Humanities Building are littered with cigarette butts, and the same is true of other stairwells on campus.

From a janitorial perspective, creating a designated smoking section on campus would streamline the process of picking up and disposing of cigarette butts, which now lay in crevices all over campus.

Without a designated smoking section on campus, students have no choice of whether or not they’ll be exposed to secondhand smoke. Instead, smokers on the outskirts of campus grounds, as well as in enclaves between buildings, are at times a student’s first impression of the El Camino campus as they start their day.

Other schools, like Santa Monica College, have campuses that are “smoke-free,” with the exception of their smoking sections. Through this decision, they have allocated space for both smokers and nonsmokers without compromising one for the other.

El Camino’s decision to not create a designated smoking section may be due to neighboring communities with area-wide public smoking bans, like Manhattan Beach.

However, Manhattan Beach’s compete ban has not effectively prevented smoking either.

The best route of action is to section off an area of campus as a smoking section to prevent non consensual secondhand smoke intake and liter, amongst other things.