The four-storey apartment complex at 140 Mann Ave. — Conservation Co-operative Homes — will no longer allow smoking inside individual units or on balconies as of January. Three designated smoking sections will be set up outside the building, about 30 metres away. They'll remain there for a year, after which time the co-op board will consider banning smoking outside as well.
More than 100 people live inside the building's 84 units. The vote was held last week, and 66 residents showed up. Eighteen of them voted against the move, while 48 voted in favour. Trevor Haché, a board member and chair of the building's second-hand smoke committee, started working to make the building smoke free not long after his family moved in three years ago.
"At first … we were having the most serious problem with second-hand marijuana smoke coming in, and then as years have progressed and different people have moved out of the building, we've had a lot of second-hand tobacco smoke coming in," Haché said. "And both are dangerous, so we formed a committee." The committee surveyed residents of the building in October 2010 and discovered there was a lot of support to change the building's rules about smoking. It took Haché and the committee 2½ years years to work up to last week's vote.
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