Supervisor Myrna Melgar filed legislation on April 7 to ban smoking on outdoor bar and tavern patios in San Francisco, a proposal that would bring the city in line with more than 100 California cities that already have similar restrictions on the books.
The ordinance would amend the city’s Health Code to prohibit smoking at those outdoor spaces and would strip exceptions that currently let smoking continue in certain indoor or semi-enclosed venues, including some hotel rooms. Those carve-outs don’t square with California law. The bill is expected to go to the Land Use and Transportation Committee, which Melgar chairs. Earliest possible hearing: May 11. If it clears committee, it needs sign-off from at least 6 supervisors before Mayor Daniel Lurie can act on it.
San Francisco is reportedly the last major Bay Area city that hasn’t enacted this kind of ban, as SFist reported. San Jose, Oakland, and Sonoma and Contra Costa counties have all moved ahead already.
Melgar said she’s still counting votes on the Board of Supervisors but felt good about threading the needle between public health goals and the concerns of bar owners. “We tend to be individualistic about health. It is about my choices that I control,” she said. “But these things are about everybody else, especially with smoking. Secondhand smoke impacts the people around you, your children, and the workers serving you. This is a really important workers’ rights issue.”
Not everybody’s convinced. District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who covers South of Market and Mission Bay, said he hasn’t decided where he stands and wants to hear from local business owners first. Those neighborhoods have bars that currently let patrons smoke on outdoor patios. Some operators worry a ban would cut into their customer base.
Dorsey’s specific concern is displacement rather than elimination. Push smokers off patios, the argument goes, and they’ll end up on sidewalks, which can create friction for nearby businesses and residential buildings. It’s a practical objection, not an ideological one.
Melgar didn’t find it persuasive. Sidewalk smoking already happens all over the city, she said, and it shouldn’t be a reason to hold back the board from acting.
The data doesn’t favor the wait-and-see position. LGBTQ Minus Tobacco, which helped push through a comparable ban in Oakland, partnered with UCSF researchers on a San Francisco study. They tested nine bar patios and found that 6 of them showed unhealthy air quality levels. That’s two-thirds of the sites.
Brian Davis, the group’s former project director and now a volunteer, told the Bay Area Reporter that San Francisco has fallen behind other jurisdictions in protecting bar workers and patrons from secondhand smoke. The San Francisco Department of Public Health and California’s Air Resources Board both track the health effects of secondhand smoke exposure in shared outdoor spaces.
The last time San Francisco updated its smoking rules in any significant way was 2019. That’s seven years without a change, while the rest of the region moved on. Whether the Board of Supervisors acts in 2026 depends partly on how 11 members weigh public health research against worries from the bar industry, and partly on whether Melgar can nail down the votes she says she’s working on.
The committee hearing on May 11 will be the first real test of where this legislation is headed.