From the looks of yesterday afternoon’s city council session, Randy Leonard’s idea to ban smoking entirely from city parks has gone—sorry for the pun—up in smoke.

Instead, the commissioners used his plan as a starting point to pull back from, and now may be reconfigured to be something like “smoking is only allowed a reasonable distance from other people.” Over the next couple of weeks, the city attorney will be looking at how to word such a ban in a way that isn’t overly complex and can actually be enforced.

This idea appears to have the backing of at least a majority of council, but it raises a number of questions: What’s the measure of “reasonable distance”? What if you begin smoking a cigarette at a “reasonable distance,” but while you’re smoking someone walks closer to you? Do you have to move, or are they essentially giving consent? How would such a rule be enforced?

The number of questions prompted Mayor Potter, toward the end of the session, to say, “This kind of brings me back to supporting something like Randy’s idea,” since a total ban would at least be easy to understand.

What did get approved yesterday was an amendment to Dan Saltzman’s parks conduct rules that bans smoking within 25 feet of children’s play areas and within 25 feet of picnic tables. If you get a permit for an event at a park, you can decide whether it will be smoking or nonsmoking.

The mayor also wants Saltzman and the Parks Bureau to consider making parts of Portland International Raceway and the city’s golf courses non-smoking. Setting up nonsmoking areas at PIR would be as simple as dividing it up by bleachers—but golf courses? Would odd holes be smoking, and even nonsmoking? It’s hard to fathom how that would work.

Saltzman’s full set of rules changes will go to council for a vote in two weeks. Among them, bans on weapons, wiping snot on city property, and on sex offenders being in swimming areas and locker rooms.

The sex offender ban elicited the most intriguing testimony of the hearing. A middle-aged man who described himself as a registered sex offender (“I’m already endangering my job, my safety, and my family by even coming here to testify,” he began), who implored city council to remove the ban, saying it further isolates people who are marginalized by society.

“Sex offender mania has swept the country,” he said. He later added, “We’re not the monsters we’re made out to be—we’ve done something stupid and a price was paid for it.”

Further, he pointed to statistics—their sources not provided—showing that sex offenders have the 2nd lowest rate of recidivism among convicted criminals, and that “95 percent of all brand new sex offenses will not be committed by someone who is a registered sex offender.”

(Not sure where he got those numbers—the Bureau of Justice Statistics has a different view.)

After the session, Saltzman said that message didn’t resonate with him. “When we’re talking about protecting children at our public parks, I’d rather we erred on the safe side.”