By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – A year after the city’s public housing went smoke-free, 20 percent of the tenants still smoke.

Auburn Housing Authority Director Rick Whiting said that Auburn’s public housing should be close to fully smoke-free in another 10 years.

The authority’s smoke-free policy grandfathered existing tenants who smoke, but new tenants and visitors are barred from smoking in or near apartment buildings.

That’s good, said Gilda Berube, who lives at the Esplanade. She walks the halls every day, she said – about 2 miles in all – and enjoys not being assaulted by noxious smoke.

“I used to be a smoker,” she added. “I quit cold turkey 30 years ago.”

James Young, another tenant, said he also enjoys a smoke-free environment.

“My apartment was always filled with other people’s smoke,” Young said. “It smelled of smoke instead of fresh vegetables while I was cooking. Now my apartment is smoke-free. The hallway outside is smoke-free. I really appreciate that.”

Smoke-free advocates said banning smoking from apartment buildings, besides providing for a healthier environment, also reduces management costs to clean and paint apartments. And it curbs the likelihood of fire, a safety measure that could result in reduced insurance rates.

Other cities interested

Now, Sanford is about to ban smoking in public housing, and Portland is thinking about it. Ditto for Lewiston and Presque Isle.

Massachusetts housing officials have even asked how the effort has worked out.

To Healthy Androscoggin and the Maine Coalition on Smoking or Health, that’s good news. The agencies have partnered to create Smoke-Free Housing for ME, a program aimed at banning smoking in multifamily housing.

Those running the program, along with some public housing managers and tenants, gathered Monday morning at the Auburn Housing Authority office at Great Falls Plaza to celebrate the city’s first anniversary of smoke-free housing.

At the same time, Sanford Housing Authority Director Bill Keefer – who said he quit smoking last week – announced that town’s intent to put a no-smoking policy in place in its public housing.

Madelyn Dennett, a tenant at Village View in the Springdale section of Sanford, said she was “really excited about what’s happening here.” She said neighbors have been asking when their housing complex might be rid of smoke.

Dec. 1 is the answer, according to Keefer, who brought Dennett to the party in Auburn and introduced her by praising her skills in baking cookies for Housing Authority workers.

Dennett acknowledged that “in the beginning we’ll not be smoke-free because of grandfathering,” but eventually secondhand smoke will no longer permeate the hallways and sneak into nonsmokers’ apartments with the opening of a door.

Her neighbors are concerned not just about the odor or the threat of cancer from inhaling that secondhand smoke, Dennett said. They’re also concerned about safety, about the likelihood of a smoker starting a fire. She knows of one tenant who’s using oxygen, and that person’s partner smokes.

“That’s scary,” she said, “and illegal.”

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