Smoke ’em if you got ’em, because the cost of cigarettes and vaping is about to go up in more ways than one.

Starting Monday, July 1, Richmond smokers will pay an extra 50 cents for a single pack of cigarettes as part of a new local law, while a statewide measure will bar anyone under the age of 21, except those with a valid military ID, from purchasing tobacco, nicotine vapor and other nicotine products. The current purchase age is 18.

The cigarette tax is new for Richmond, and was proposed by Mayor Levar M. Stoney as part of a package of tax increases to raise funds for repairs for schools, street paving and other critical needs in the city. It was approved in May by the Richmond City Council in a unanimous vote as part of the 2019-20 budget that will go into effect on Monday, as well.

With Richmond being the original home of cigarette manufacturing, a majority of City Council members had long ignored the authority to tax cigarettes and rejected attempts to impose one, most recently last year when Councilman Parker C. Agelasto, 5th District, advanced it.

Currently, more than 90 localities, including every other city in Virginia, has long levied a local tax as an add-on to the state and federal taxes people already pay.

A study funded by Philip Morris USA, the tobacco-focused division of the Altria group that has its biggest cigarette factory in Richmond, and released by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, stated that low-income Richmonders and small businesses would suffer the most under the new tax, with the city ultimately failing to raise the $3.2 million Mayor Stoney had estimated the new tax would generate in the first year.

Strapped for cash to balance the new budget and eager to avoid an increase in the tax on property that Mayor Stoney also sought, the council dropped its opposition and approved the cigarette tax. The vote came despite warnings from a council minority and convenience stores that the tax would result in lost jobs and reduce sales of gas and other items on which the city collects sales tax as people travel to the surrounding counties to buy cheaper smokes.

In a compromise to gain the needed votes, the council majority earmarked up to $1.6 million of the money collected from the new tax for a smoking cessation program to be run by the Richmond City Health District. The remainder is to go to the city’s general fund.

The bill to raise the smoking age was introduced in the Virginia General Assembly this year by GOP Delegate Christopher P. Stolle of Virginia Beach and was approved with bipartisan support in the House of Delegates and state Senate before being signed into law by Gov. Ralph S. Northam in February.

Virginia is now one of seven states to have raised the legal smoking age. Vaping company JUUL Labs came out in support of the higher age limit to smoke, while Altria voiced its interest in a federal law to raise the legal smoking age.