Riverside Council Extends Temporary Moratorium On New Tobacco Retail Permits

The Riverside City Council Tuesday voted unanimously to extend the temporary pause on new tobacco retail permits for another 10 months and 15 days.

The extension, according to Deputy Chief Charles Payne, would give staff more time to study the city’s current regulations, develop new regulatory tools and reach out to impacted communities for feedback. 

“I’ll tell you that those discussions have already started,” Payne said at the October 21 meeting. “We’re working with community stakeholders on what the recommended best practices and what’s going to happen with this, what we’re going to bring back to city council.”

Councilmember Sean Mill, who championed the moratorium along with Councilmember Philip Falcone, said the city’s tobacco retailers grew for a long period of time without oversight. This pause, he said, would give the council time to catch up to that growth and implement stricter enforcement tools. 

“If you look at where they usually are set up, it’s usually in less affluent areas,” Mill said. “We need to be mindful that we don’t allow businesses like this to proliferate in areas where they’re having issues already.”

Paloma Montes, public policy lead for the Blue Zones Project Riverside, spoke in support of the temporary moratorium, bringing a large jar filled with cigarette butts up to the podium with her. She said her team had collected the butts from a park, a grocery store and a senior living facility during a volunteer waste-clean up event.

At that senior living facility, Montes said an elderly woman spoke with the volunteers about the negative impacts of tobacco use in her community, which had two smoke shops nearby.

“It has been shown that areas with a higher density of tobacco retailers experience an increased rate of tobacco use among youth, adults and higher rates of tobacco initiation among young people,” Montes said. “We support our city’s efforts to further investigate and study the regulation of tobacco retail establishments to protect Riverside public health, safety and welfare.”

An initial 45-day moratorium was approved in September, following an eight-month police investigation that found several shops selling cannabis, nitrous oxide tanks and psilocybin mushrooms. The report also said police confiscated thousands of illegal tobacco and cannabis products, as well as hundreds of mushroom packages from 13 shops across the city.

The latest vote will extend the moratorium until September 15, 2026. The council has the option to lift the moratorium ahead of that date or extend it for an additional year.