Smoking Ban Gaining In D.C.

And council members Kwame R. Brown (D-At Large) and Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) said yesterday that if Schwartz does not act by the council recess, they will introduce a ban as an emergency bill, which would bypass the committee structure and go to the full council for a vote.

Witnesses for each side of the issue arrived yesterday with briefcases filled with studies and statistics that showed that a smoking ban either had no effect on businesses or ravaged the hospitality economy in places where it was instituted.

They differed over who truly represented the interests of hospitality workers. Ban proponents said the effort is centered on protecting workers from the ill effects of second-hand smoke. But bar owners, managers and workers themselves said the council was jeopardizing their livelihoods and the freedom of choice of their customers.

"Not all workers want to be protected," said Kelly Rader, a member of Ban the Ban, an organization that sells T-shirts that say, "Smoking is healthier than fascism."

Other witnesses told of family members who did not smoke but died of smoking-related illnesses because a spouse smoked or because they spent time in smoky environments.

Seven states, including California, New York and Massachusetts, 1,900 U.S. localities and Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Italy and New Zealand have comprehensive smoke-free laws, according to the American Cancer Society.

Melvin R. Thompson, a representative of the Restaurant Association of Maryland, testified that since the smoking ban was enacted in Montgomery County in October 2003, the number of restaurants and bars with liquor licenses that paid state sales tax declined from 526 in March 2003 to 402 in December 2004. He said beer keg sales in the county declined by 2,366, noting that 300,000 fewer glasses of beer were poured from April to December 2004 than in the same period a year earlier.

Ban proponents said the economic impacts have not been as severe as opponents said.

Bobb said the mayor studied New York City's one-year review of its ban, which showed that the city's bar and restaurant industry was thriving, business tax receipts were up 8.7 percent, employment was up by more than 10,000 jobs and New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported the law.

Brown, a co-introducer of one of the smoking ban bills, said that if smoking bans really wreaked economic havoc on bars and restaurants, politicians would be falling over themselves to repeal the bans.

"No one is jumping up to repeal in Montgomery County, no one's jumping up to repeal in New York City, no one is jumping up in California, are they?" Brown said.