Smoking, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes are now banned from all Iowa City parks.

On Tuesday the Iowa City Council voted 6 to 1 in its final reading of an ordinance amendment that finalized the ban. Mayor Jim Throgmorton voted against all three readings of the ordinance change.

"I don't think this is a public health issue. I look at a list that's contained in our packet, a list of parks in which smoking is already prohibited, and it's a pretty extensive list," Throgmorton said during the council's first consideration on Sept. 19.

Clay Claussen, chairman of Iowa City's Parks and Recreation Commission, at the September meeting, said the Parks and Recreation Department does not intend to "infringe on anyone's rights, but we'd like to look at it as a health issue." He also had likened creating designated smoking areas in parks to allowing smoking on commercial airline flights.

"If someone's in Hickory Hill Park, it's not like being in a airplane," Throgmorton said at that meeting.

Iowa City Parks and Recreation Director Juli Seydell Johnson in a Sept. 19 memo to council the discussion about banning tobacco and e-cigarettes in parks began after Johnson County Public Health gave a Jan. 11 presentation to the Parks and Recreation Commission.

Tobacco and e-cigarettes already had been restricted in some city parks, she said in her memo, but chewing tobacco was not.

The Smokefree Air Act passed by the state in 2008 banned smoking "tobacco products" in certain public places, Seydell Johnson said in her memo, and allowed local governments to extend those restrictions to property they own. In 2015, after a similar proposal from Johnson County Public Health officials, the council voted to ban use of e-cigarettes where smoking already was prohibited.

"I do think it's a health issue," council member Susan Mims said at the Sept. 19 meeting, adding that during the Cyclo-cross World Cup at the Johnson County Fairgrounds, she had to move away from a person who was smoking.

"I think it impinges on other people's health and rights to use those spaces in a comfortable and convenient way," she said.

Two weeks before its first consideration of the tobacco and e-cigarettes ban, the council also indefinitely deferred its consideration of allowing alcohol in park shelters around the city. That measure, proposed at the request of city residents, would have allowed limited alcohol consumption in park shelters after receiving a city-issued permit.

That decision, made Sept. 5 during its final reading of the ordinance amendment, came after the Partnership for Alcohol Safety wrote to the council and requested deferral. Throgmorton is co-chair of the partnership between the city and University of Iowa.

Reach Andy Davis at 319-887-5404 or at aldavis@press-citizen.com, and follow him on Twitter as @BylineAndyDavis.