Ah, summertime. Time for sun, sand, surf and ... cigarettes? Smokers are lighting up at city beaches and not cleaning up when they leave.

Coney Island, the city's busiest shoreline, was covered in butts over the weekend - and not the kind that peek out of low-slung swim trunks.

The Daily News was easily able to gather a small mountain of butts from the sand - nearly 1,000 in all - as the holiday crowds thinned on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

"It's disgusting," said Michael Austine, 50, of Middle Village, Queens, as he surveyed the tobacco addicts' litter.

"It's like sitting in a giant ashtray."

And it's not just the smoking litter on land that's a problem.

The nonprofit advocacy group Ocean Conservancy says cigarette butts and filters, left on the sand and swept out to sea by the tide, are a top source of marine debris.

The city Parks Department cleans the beaches nightly, using hand-towed and tractor-towed rakes and sifters, spokeswoman Vickie Karp said.

But that doesn't help beachgoers looking for fresh air who find themselves crammed next to smoke-spewing butt-flingers.

"It's nasty," said Rose Mangual, 53, of Jersey City. "I get bronchial asthma because of stuff like this."

Smokers are banned from restaurants, bars, city playgrounds and bowling alleys, but they can still indulge their habit at the beaches.

The city last year proposed a ban on smoking in beaches and parks that is backed by the NYC Coalition for a Smoke-Free City.

"Everyone has the right to breathe clean air, whether they are at a park, beach, ballfield or playground, or even a bar," said the coalition's Sheelah Feinberg.

"If smoke is secondhand and you're outside, people think it doesn't matter. But the truth is, there is no safe level of secondhand smoke.

"There are still carcinogens, and it's an environmental issue. Cigarette butts take years to decompose."

Since the Health Department broached the idea of a ban in a policy paper, nothing has been done to study the feasibility, spokeswoman Erin Bradley said.

Twenty-six other cities across New York State do have beach bans - and in a city where 16% of the residents smoke, there's plenty of support for it here.

"I'm a smoker and I'm all for it," said Debbie Mammine, 46, of Middle Village. "People need to learn how to deposit their butts in a nearby garbage bag, but they don't."

Others were horrified by the notion.

"It's public. It's open. They're making this a Communist country. This is public air," said Carlos Valentin, a 43-year-old Staten Island smoker who was lounging at Coney with his wife and three young kids.

Plus, Valentin protested, a ban would not necessarily mean fewer butts at Coney - which has already generated 420 tons of trash since Memorial Day, twice that of any other beach.

"They've been combing these beaches for years and guess what, there are still bottles," he said.

(Por Mark Morales and Katie Nelson, NY Daily News, 06/07/2010)