By Timothy Churchill,Staff Writer

OXFORD – Putting his money where his mouth is, an Oxford store owner is quitting cigarettes to protest a decision by the state Legislature.

On Monday, Ron Snow, who owns a discount store on Fore Street called C and R Redemption, removed all cigarettes from his store in response to last Friday’s decision by the state Legislature to approve a $1 tax hike on packs of cigarettes.

Snow made the decision to rid his store of cigarettes Monday, C and R store manager Mike Sturgis said Wednesday afternoon. “He just totally disapproves of what the state’s doing and doesn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Sturgis said. “He just wants to take a stand,” he added.

Snow could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The tax increase, one of several measures in a bill to balance the state budget, would double the current tax, raising it to $2.

Gov. John Baldacci has yet to sign the bill, L.D. 1691, which was approved last Friday by narrow margins in the House and Senate, Cyr said Wednesday. The bill is meant to replace a controversial borrowing provision in the two-year $5.7 billion budget enacted in March. The Legislature expects to raise $125 million on the cigarette tax alone, according to Mark Cyr of the state’s Office of Fiscal and Program Review.

If Baldacci does sign L.D. 1691, the cigarette tax will go into effect on Sept. 19.

Sturgis said that Snow thinks the tax would simply be unfair to those who smoke.

“He feels it would be discriminatory toward the smokers,” Sturgis added, “I understand how he feels, but I am a smoker and he’s not.”

But more than that, Sturgis said, Snow thinks cigarette smokers are being unduly burdened by the government’s incompetence.

“He thinks they’re putting it on the smokers,” Sturgis said about his boss, “because the state can’t balance its own budget.”

Sturgis said he was sure the $1 tax increase on cigarettes would have had a fiscal impact on C and R. Although smokers still purchase cigarettes at the store with the present tax, Sturgis said, a doubling of the tax would have caused many of them to cross the border for their tobacco.

“I have had some people come in here and tell me that they will go to New Hampshire,” Sturgis said. “And we’re the cheapest place around to get cigarettes,” he added.

Smoker and Oxford resident Chris Bezio, who was at C and R Wednesday afternoon, said that even now, with a $1 tax, he seldom buys cigarettes in Maine.

“I hang out with friends in South Portland, then go down to Portsmouth” to save upward of $10 on a carton of cigarettes, Bezio said.

Asked if Snow would ever restock his shelves with cigarettes if a $2 tax becomes a fact of life, Sturgis said that that option hadn’t been entirely ruled out.

“Maybe sometime in the future, but he doesn’t really know at this point,” Sturgis said.