This Monday the San Francisco Board of Supervisors expressed its strong support for a bill introduced by San Francisco City and County Mayor Gavin Newsom to impose an extra charge on each cigarette pack sold across the City to employ an additional group of workers that would clean the streets, sidewalks and lawns from discarded cigarette butts.

However, despite getting to Supervisors Committee’s approval, the mayor's communications manager declared that the litter fee would be reduced from initial 33 cents for each pack to 20 cent-per-pack charge.

Mayor Newsom said he has been delighted and completely satisfied getting to know that the Ways and Means Committee approved the bill, which has been passed for the consideration of full board of Supervisors that is expected to adopt the ordinance next week.

The Mayor spokesman, Gary Menard, said that litter causes additional and highly undesirable in the current difficult economic situation expenses for the City Budget and therefore, for city’s taxpayers and the butts comprise a significant part of that issue.

He added that cleaning all the butts would help to eliminate the absorption of hazardous toxins from discarded butts that penetrate into the soil and waters.

The Mayor introduced his proposal last month stating that generated revenue would ease the burden that the city is due to pay each year for the cleanup of all lawns and sidewalks.. He declared that the annual expenses for cleaning litter are around $44 million and even more. Almost one-third of that money is paid for collecting cigarette butts.

The proposed fee was lowered because the mayor’s office decided to subtract the expenses on sweeping the sidewalks and streets since it has been done constantly and not only to dispose cigarette butts. Therefore, they have decided to leave up only the expenses on removing cigarette butts, what is done manually, said the head of the Environment Department James Skelton.

"We decided to count only the costs paid for manual cleanup of cigarette butts, what is a reasonable and fair fee that could not be challenged by cigarette makers,” Skelton admitted.

Skelton said that they decided to exclude sweeping costs since that was done and would be done with the same frequency.

In conformity with the proposal, the 20-cent cigarette litter tax, which would be obtained from cigarette distributors, is supposed to generate around $6 million annually for the city agencies that are responsible for the removal of cigarette butts, and particularly the Department of Public Works.