Sauk County tops tobacco watchdog’s list

A state program that surveyed 65 Wisconsin communities says Sauk County retailers were most likely to sell tobacco products to minors.
"I have been doing these investigations for five or six years and have never seen numbers this high," said Jeff Melby, assistant coordinator of the South Central Wisconsin Tobacco Free Coalition.
Melby performs compliance checks for Wisconsin Wins, a state Department of Health Services program that seeks to reduce youth access to tobacco and tobacco-related products. Underage volunteers working with the group walk into businesses and try to purchase tobacco products.
Wisconsin Wins reports that 10 of 32 Sauk County businesses surveyed - about 31 percent - illegally sold tobacco to the volunteers. That was the highest rate out of the 65 communities surveyed statewide during the same time period.
Melby released year-to-date figures Thursday showing that 27 of the 72 businesses he has surveyed throughout all of 2010 sold to minors.
"That's not good," Melby said.
He said some clerks are not aware of less common tobacco products, such as snus - a pouch that users slide under their lip - or dissolvable strips.
"I think they are not watching those sales as carefully," Melby said. "We actually had a situation where a volunteer was trying to purchase snus and one clerk in Sauk County was not even sure that qualified as a tobacco product."
A high rate of turnover at gas stations and convenience stores in the tourism-based Wisconsin Dells could play a role in Sauk County's high numbers of illegal sales, Melby said, adding that employees who are new on the job may not know state requirements when it comes to checking identification.
Melby said greater education and enforcement should help increase compliance with the law.
He also said he would like to see more law enforcement agencies join in the compliance checks and issue citations.
In Reedsburg this summer, Police Chief Tim Becker announced that five sellers who failed compliance checks would receive citations.
The Wisconsin Wins surveys are not scientific, but are intended as educational tools, said Beth Kaplan, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services.
She said the state also conducts scientific surveys as part of a federal program called Synar. States must have non-compliance rates of less than 20 percent to qualify for certain federal funding. Just over 7 percent of Wisconsin businesses surveyed in the Synar program in 2009 failed their compliance tests.