MADISON, Wis. — Texting while driving, smoking in public and cooking with arteryclogging trans fats will be that much harder under a number of state laws set to take effect around the country Friday.
Faced with huge budget shortfalls and little extra money to throw around, state lawmakers exercised their power to clamp down on impolite, unhealthy and sometimes dangerous behaviors in 2009.
Even toy guns were targeted.
Among new laws set to take effect in 2010 is a smoking ban for bars and restaurants in North Carolina, the country’s largest tobacco producer.
Starting Saturday - stragglers get a one-day reprieve to puff away after their New Year’s Day meals - smokers will no longer be allowed to light up in North Carolina bars and restaurants. There are exceptions for country clubs, Elks lodges and the like, but the change is a dramatic one for North Carolina, whose tax coffers long depended on tobacco companies.
Virginia approved a similar law that took effect Dec. 1, but it’s more accommodating to smokers because it allows establishments to offer areas in which to light up as long as they have separate ventilating systems.
Not including Virginia and its partial ban, smoking will be banned in restaurants in 29 states and in bars in 25, according to the American Lung Association.
And 12 more states - including Florida, Michigan and Arkansas - have passed laws requiring manufacturers to make their cigarettes less likelyto start fires, leaving Wyoming as the only state without such laws, according to the Coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes.
The Arkansas cigarette safety law is Act 697.
Also taking effect Friday is Arkansas Act 714 of 2009, which allows the Arkansas Cemetery Board to revise funding requirements to ensure sufficient deposits into a cemetery company’s permanent maintenance fund and defines a “lawn crypt.”
Bans on texting while driving go into effect in New Hampshire, Oregon and Illinois. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, that will make 19 states that have outlawed the practice, not including six states that prohibit using hand-held cell phones while behind the wheel.
A new Arkansas law, Act 1495, prohibits retailers from selling toy guns that look like the real thing. But it may not have that big of an effect.
Imitation guns used for theater productions and other events are exempted, as are replicas of firearms produced before 1898, BB guns, paintball or pellet guns.
Major retailers in the state also say they don’t expect any major changes from the new ban. Bentonville-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. says it already follows similar federal restrictions prohibiting the sale of realistic-looking toy guns.
California will be the first state to partially ban the use of artificial trans fats in restaurants in 2010, after several major cities and fast-food chains have erased it from menus.
Starting Friday, California’s restaurants, bakeries and other retail food establishments will no longer be allowed to use products with trans fats in spreads or for frying. Restaurants will still be allowed to use trans fats to deep-fry yeast dough and in cake batter until Jan. 1, 2011.
In New Hampshire, a new gay-marriage law will replace a law that allows civil unions, which already provided homosexual couples with all the rights and responsibilities of marriage.
Starting Friday, a homosexual couple in a civil union can get a marriage license and have a new ceremony, if they choose. They also can convert their civil union into marriage without going through another ceremony. Couples who do nothing will have their civil unions automatically converted to marriages in 2011. Opponents are seeking to repeal the law.
Information for this article was contributed by Gary D. Robertson, William McCall, Christopher Wills, Norma Love, Juliet Williams, Melinda Deslatte, Sandra Chereb, Bill Kaczor and Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press and by Seth Blomeley of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/31/2009