Fayetteville considers snuffing bar smoking

FAYETTEVILLE — Smoke rises from the end of John Bailey’s cigarette and wafts toward the long light over the pool table at White Star Tavern.

This is where the Winslow man goes to drink beer with the friends he’s gotten to know over the years, and the experience just isn’t as good without a few cigarettes.

He’s not a smoker, though, because he only smokes when he drinks. That hardly counts, he said.

“If someone doesn’t like smoke, go to another bar,” said Bailey, 42, a retired Army sergeant who fought in Iraq. “If you work there, go get a job somewhere [where] there’s no smoke.

“I fought for freedom. Don’t tell me I can’t smoke.”

Yet Fayetteville will tell Bailey and everyone else they can’t smoke in bars if Adella Gray has her way. The Ward 1 alderman wants to eliminate the exemption for bars in the city smoking ban approved by voters in 2004.

Gray expects the City Council will take up her proposal on May 3.

“There’s plenty of data now to support the (health) effects, to say nothing about the pleasure it takes awayfrom people who have to be in that situation - like the bartenders and the musicians,” Gray said. “They have to be there to make a living. We know what it’s doing to their lungs.”

It’s likely the state Legislature also will consider eliminating exemptions to the state’s Clean Indoor Air Act, passed in 2006, before the current legislative session ends. State Rep. Tracy Steele, D-North Little Rock, said he’ll file a bill this week to amend the current law.

Requested changes would include eliminating the ex-emption for bars, said Steele, who as a state senator sponsored the 2006 legislation.

“I think if bars were smoke-free, that would be a major step toward making Arkansas a more comprehensive clean-air state,” he said. “We took a huge step, but we fell a little short last time. We allowed bars to opt out.”

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that cigarette smoking kills about 443,000 people annually in the United States.

Smoking and inhaling secondhand smoke increases a person’s chance of developing heart disease, lung cancer and other types of cancer, the center says.

“We’re just telling smokers to take it outside,” said Barbara Kumpe, a lobbyist for the American Heart Association and vice chairman of the Step Up Coalition, an organization formed in 2006 to advocate for policy changes to reduce tobacco use in the state. “We’re saying you have a right to smoke, but I have a right to breath clean air.”

Those favoring smoking bans said businesses won’t suffer financially if every bar is smoke-free, but bar owner Max Leichner doesn’t buy it.

Leichner, who’s owned The Beer Keg in Fayetteville for a decade, estimates that 90 percent of his customers are smokers. His business has been helped by being one of 379 businesses in the state that hold exemptions from the Arkansas Department of Health to allow smoking, he said.

“That will just close the door of this little bar,” said Leichner, 63, who said the bar’s revenue supplements his Social Security check. “Most people who are protesting have never seen this bar, and it just shouldn’t be that way.”

Fayetteville’s original ordinance would have banned smoking in stand-alone bars, but alderman eventually agreed to exempt bars from the city’s ordinance. When the smoking restrictions went to voters in February 2004, bars weren’t included, said City Attorney Kit Williams.

Leichner promises he’ll be a loud opponent of Gray’s proposal.

“I will be there,” he said. “I was there the first time they tried to get us.”

WHAT’S NOT ALLOWED

The Fayetteville ordinance bans smoking in enclosed public places except stand-alone bars that serve only alcohol. Smoking isn’t allowed in places that serve prepared food but is allowed in bars with no food or only foods that don’t require preparation, such as potato chips.

The state’s workplace smoking-ban bill breezed through the special legislative session in 2006 with little debate. It passed 30-4 in the Senate and 63-32 in the House.

Act 8 bans smoking in indoor businesses. It forbids smoking in such places as private-office restrooms, employee lounges, elevators and meeting areas.

The Arkansas law also bans smoking in all bars and restaurants unless the business prevents those under age 21 from entering. Business owners can request exemptions from the state to allow smoking in such places as hotel rooms, businesses with fewer than three employees and retail tobacco shops.

The Arkansas Department of Health’s draft proposal for changing the state law eliminates the exemptions for standalone bars, small workplaces and small hotels.

Officials at the state Health Department don’t buy the argument that business suffers when people can’t smoke in bars and other places. They say that’s born out in a March 2010 study commissioned by the Northwest Arkansas Tobacco Free Coalition.

In the study, the University of Arkansas’ Center for Business and Economic Research looked at various sales tax revenues in other Southeastern Conference college towns with comprehensive smoking bans.

The study showed three cities in collegiate athletics’ Southeastern Conference with stricter smoke-free policies - Oxford and Starkville, Miss., and Auburn, Ala. Those cities saw a “positive and significant” impact on taxable sales after the policies were put in place. The effect was more noticeable than in Knoxville, Tenn .,and Baton Rouge, SEC college towns with less-restrictive smoke-free policies.

Those findings suggest that removing exemptions for bars in Fayetteville wouldn’t harm business, said Kathy Deck, director of UA’s Center for Business and Economic Research.

“Most studies would show that same kind of result,” Deck said. “It’s representative.

“You do a study like this to make your best guess. Can we think of any good reason why [Fayetteville] would be different? I can’t.”

Oxford Mayor Pat Patterson said his city’s businesses weren’t harmed by the comprehensive smoking ban that took effect in 2006.

“My complaints the past couple of years are practically nil,” Patterson said. “The vast majority are happy.”

However, Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said his research while he worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showed such bans do harm some businesses. At the time he did the research, he was bothered that most economic-impact research had been sponsored by public-health advocates.

“The entertainment and hospitality business is all about finding a niche,” Pakko said. “You have the best pasta, the cheapest beer or a place to hang out and smoke. It makes your business special.

“A smoke-free policy would have an effect on sales at bars that have chosen to allow smoking.”

FIRST IN ARKANSAS

While Fayetteville was the first city in the state to pass a smoking ordinance, Fairfield Bay was the first to ban smoking in most public places in 2005.

The retirement community on Greers Ferry Lake has Arkansas’ most restrictive smoke-free law. It applies to most places of employment but exempts federal and county government buildings.

At the polls, 52 percent of voters in Fairfield Bay approved the ban, which took effect in 2006. It remains the only city in the state that Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights considersto be 100 percent smoke-free, said Cynthia Hallett, executive director of the Berkeley, Calif.-based organization.

“As a movement, these 100 percent smoke-free laws start at the local level,” Hallett said. “It would be great if Fayetteville can strengthen the law. If they pass it, other cities will see that the sky won’t fall and these laws are good for business.

“The majority of studies that look at sales tax receipts, and that are not just perception surveys, show business remains the same or improves. That makes sense. When you go smoke-free, you open your door to more patrons.”

Fairfield Bay Mayor Paul Wellenberger said that’s what happened in his city.

It was estimated in 2008 that 22.3 percent of adults age 18 or older in Arkansas were smokers.

“They all thought it was going to be the end of the world,” Wellenberger said. “The business has picked up when it all went smoke-free.

“You are offending 79 percent of people to cater to the 21 percent who smoke. Youare doing a disservice to your customer base. It’s turned out good for us.”

David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria Group Inc., the parent company of Marlboro manufacturer Philip Morris USA, said via e-mail: “The conclusions of public-health officials concerning environmental tobacco smoke are sufficient to warrant certain measures that regulate smoking.

“We maintain, however, that complete bans go too far.” Owners of restaurants and bars “are most familiar with how to accommodate the needs of their patrons and should have the flexibility to determine their own smoking policy,” he wrote.

OTHER STATES

Hallett said 23 states have100 percent smoke-free laws. Those states, plus laws in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., cover 47.8 percent of the U.S. population, she said.

That’s an increase from two years ago, when such laws applied to 33.1 percent of people, Hallett said.

Whether Arkansas becomes the next state to change its law is unclear. Kumpe, the American Heart Association lobbyist, said the organization would “like to see it happen.”

“It’s just the timing of the bill and the filing of the bill,” she said. “You just never know what’s going to happen.

“What makes it hard right now is most people in the state of Arkansas think all of Arkansas is smoke-free, but there are employees in our state whoaren’t covered by the smokefree law.”

It may be that Gray’s proposal in Fayetteville, if approved, has influence statewide, said Katherine Donald, director of the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Arkansas in Little Rock.

“That information about what’s going on in Fayetteville certainly trickles down the hill and down Interstate 40 to central Arkansas, and people will know about it,” Donald said. “Maybe it will be that we’ll want to examine what’s feasible in our communities.”

All of the discussion of eliminating exemptions and changing the state and city smoke-free laws worries White Star Tavern customers and employees. Several said they know about tobacco’s negative health effects, but they like to smoke regardless of those consequences.

“You can’t have tacos without having taco sauce,” Bailey said. “You can’t have beer without a cigarette.”

Ray Jones, 61, knows the yellow tinge in his mustache comes from nicotine, the habit-forming stimulant that’s present in tobacco plants. He doesn’t care.

“They’re taking people’s right away,” Jones said.

There are a few people who don’t smoke among the small group at the tavern, like Dean Drummond, 84. He likes chatting with friends like Bailey and he’s not discouraged by smokers who sit near him.

“If you get too much of it, it will bother you,” Drummond said. “My lungs are pretty weak. Old age, I guess.”

Bartender Janet Pry, who smokes, said bar owner Owen Batson’s business would decrease if smoking were forbidden inside.

“I’m fidgety,” Pry said. “I want something to do with my hands. I’m 55, and I’ve smoked since I was 18. I wouldn’t be able to work here if I couldn’t smoke.”