HRS Moves To Ban Smoking, Vaping At Walnut Village

Highlands Residential Services (HRS) will ban all smoking at its Walnut Village once renovations are complete.

Executive Director Dow Harris discussed the topic during Thursday’s board of directors meeting.

“As these residents move back into a new, remodeled apartment, there’s no smoking if you agree with this policy,” Harris said. “Otherwise, we’re going to continue to have problems and we’re having problems with the policy as it exists.”

The board of directors unanimously approved banning smoking and vaping at Walnut Village. Currently, all HRS residents are allowed to smoke as long as they’re more than 25 feet from any housing.

Harris said the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has recently implemented new policies limiting smoking in public housing across the country.

“Other housing authorities have used this same process and ran into the same problem,” Harris said. “I’ve kind of felt all along that five years from when that started, that we would kind if evolve, and we’re probably going to come back at some point and recommend that the housing authority be entirely smoke-free, period.”

HRS Director of Operations Chris Cassetty said some apartments have clear signs of a smoker living in them.

“I was over at Walnut Village this morning meeting with LHP’s inspector and we walked through and looked at a couple of units,” Cassetty said, “I could walk into a unit and immediately tell if they were a smoker or not. Once we fix that and once we renovate that unit… I want to be able to not walk in and smell that anymore and not just for me, but anybody.”

Harris said the policy change would impact approximately five percent of Walnut Village’s residents. However, Harris also noted that most smokers at Walnut Village are actually visitors and not tenants.