Defiance: ND Bismarck Man Takes A Stand

Smoking ban is a business choice

6/16/06

Bars are businesses. Their owners should be able to make business decisions, including whether to allow smoking on the premises.

Consideration aside of whether the Bismarck City Commission was right in imposing a smoking ban on lounges adjoining restaurants, even when having a physical barrier and a separate ventilation system, still, bars that are bars only should remain exempt from city or state efforts to make the smoking decision for them.

It’s throwing up a bit of a smoke screen for entities or individuals to claim that the focus of the struggle is on workplace safety. Let’s all be straightforward: It’s about where smokers should be allowed — yes, allowed — to send their tobacco fumes into the air around them. Some say, “No place where other people could have to be around them.” At least that’s a forthright position.

Bar owners who are willing to permit the practice in their establishments are making several conscious choices — and mind you, they also have a perfect right to impose their own ban on burning tobacco.

They choose to limit the pool of those willing to work in their places of business under those conditions. No one can be compelled to work around smokers. He or she can say, “I’ll work somewhere else.”

Perhaps the members of the Coin and Tavern Association can take it upon themselves to require themselves as owners or operators to provide prospective employees with printed materials on the known dangers of inhaling tobacco smoke — not propaganda from anti-tobacco activitists but an objective summary of what is known scientifically.

Then perhaps the employer should obtain an acknowledgment of informed consent from the worker.

Maybe that’s a way that the workplace safety issue could be handled.

But everyone knows that there is a great deal more involved in the controversy.

There is the Public Education Task Force on Tobacco spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that public health units — governmental entities — receive from the tobacco settlement. It’s being spent on advertising. The theme is the danger of being around smokers. Ergo, they say, bars that allow smoking are dangerous places. Q.E.D.

Or not.

That some bar owners who permit smoking are placing signs outside their doors saying customers will likely encounter smoking inside is responsible conduct on the bar owners’ part.

A conscious choice being made by these businessmen is that if they allow smoking, they will not get some patronage.

We don’t have to enter a bar that’s smoky.

It’s about choices.

BISMARCK, N.D. – The day the Legislature approved a smoking ban for most North Dakota businesses, Dennis Laches put a sign on his laundry and television repair shop, announcing he would close when the ban took effect Aug. 1.

“Nobody knew if he was going to go through with it,” said Mott Mayor Troy Mosbrucker. “He had a point to prove, and he proved it.”

As promised on Monday, Laches closed his businesses in the town of about 800 in southwestern North Dakota.

On Wednesday, an economic development group purchased the laundry machines, mainly to keep the 100 or so visiting custom wheat harvesters in town, Mosbrucker said.

“If they leave town to do their laundry, then they leave the town grocery, the gas station and the cafe,” Mosbrucker said. “Everything loses.”

Laches said his laundry and TV repair business were never moneymakers in the 17 years he owned them. State officials know of no other businesses that have closed because of the new smoking ban.

Law enforcement officers as well as businesses are still trying to adjust to it.

“We had some call that are dissatisfied, but it’s been very few,” said Kathleen Mangskau, director of the Health Department’s tobacco prevention and control program. Many people have called wanting a stricter smoking ban, she said.

“They wish it was extended further to bars and casinos,” she said.

“I think the public, overall, is pleased that this is finally happening,” Mangskau said.

Ward County Sheriff Vern Erck said the new law likely will be a hassle for law enforcement initially.

“It’s almost embarrassing walking in and being called the smoke police,” Erck said. “We have better things to do, but we’ll enforce it.”

The new state law bans smoking in public areas and workplaces. Bars are exempt, unless they have a restaurant in the smoking area.

People can be fined up to $500 for violating the state’s anti-smoking law. A building owner who deliberately allows illegal smoking may be fined up to $100 for the first violation. The fine increases to $200 for a second violation within a year, and to $500 for subsequent infractions that are within a year of the previous one.

In Minot, the ban prompted calls to the sheriff’s office with tips that people were lighting up at Bingorama, Erck said.

“They were, in fact, smoking when me and the deputy went in there,” Erck said.

Ash trays were collected, but no one was cited, he said.

Laches, 59, said closing down the TV repair business and coin-operated laundry in Mott had nothing to do with his pack-a-day habit. It is a question of fairness, he said.

“The state of North Dakota is attempting to make me discriminate against another person or group of people,” Laches said. “I don’t believe government of any kind should be allowed to dictate what I do at my own business and my own building.”

The group, known as Mott’s Opportunity for Today and Tomorrow, purchased eight washing machines and seven dryers for $2,000, Mosbrucker said. The group is funded through charitable gambling sites in town.

“Only five of the washing machines work,” Laches said.

He said there was no haggling over the price or the terms of the agreement, which allows the use of Laches’ building for 60 days.

“I gave them a figure, and that’s what they paid,” Laches said.

Mosbrucker said the deal came through just as six pickup loads of harvesters were headed elsewhere to do laundry. He said the visiting wheat workers remained in Mott.

“They were getting a little gamey because they didn’t have a choice,” Mosbrucker said. “You could stand their pants up in the corner.”

The North Dakota Association for the Disabled runs a dozen gambling sites in North Dakota, including Minot’s Bingorama and the Bingo Palace in Grand Forks, where police were called on Monday. Officers confiscated ash trays there and ordered smokers to snuff out their smokes.

Erck said the Minot group acquired a business license for a smoke shop, in an attempt to skirt the new law. It consisted of “a couple of fishbowls with cartons of cigarettes in them sitting on a picnic table,” he said.

An attorney for the nonprofit promised to “cease and desist” after Ward County prosecutors threatened fines, the sheriff said.

“It was kind of a Cuban missile crisis in Minot – and their attorney backed down,” Erck said.

“They asked us to stop and we did,” said Ron Gibbens, president and chief executive officer of the association. “We are not interested in getting into a battle over this.”

Gibbens said the association “believes adults are free to make their own choices, but we’ll also do anything we can to help them quit (smoking).”

He said the group believed the bingo halls would see fewer players with the smoking ban in place, but it has not been as bad as he thought.

“So far, I’m a little pleasantly surprised,” Gibbens said. “We’ve had a couple of instances where it’s fallen off, and a couple where it hasn’t. It will take to time to know what the result will be.”

As for Laches, he said he’ll probably retire now, or move out of North Dakota to find work.

“If I find a job, it’s going to have to be in a state that allows smoking,” he said.

http://www.grandforks.com

08-03-2005
By LAUREN DONOVAN, Bismarck Tribune

MOTT — Custom combiners couldn’t have picked a worse time to show up in Mott with dirty clothes.

The southwestern grain town will host as many as 150 custom cutters in the coming days, but there won’t be anywhere in town for them to wash their undies.

The blame for that goes to the state’s new anti-smoking law, which went into effect Monday.

Dennis Laches, owner of a television repair and laundromat, posted a sign on the door that said he’s closed up shop because of the new law.

Even an intercession by Mott Mayor Troy Mosbrucker Tuesday afternoon didn’t change his mind.

Laches, 59, a smoker himself, said if he can’t legally smoke in his own building, he won’t keep it open.

The laundromat owner said the business barely paid its own bills anyway, but if he can’t be there all day like he usually is to keep an eye on the water pipes and fuse box, he won’t be there at all.

Mosbrucker tried to persuade him to open it a couple hours a week for the custom cutters, at least, but Laches said they should blame the inconvenience on state leaders, not him.

Laches regularly entertained a group of Mott fellas, who convened for coffee, cards and a smoke or two in the morning.

Now, that’s history, too, although Laches does point out that he can smoke in his building if he wants to, now that it’s closed.

“I’m not a rich person and in six to eight months, I’ll be destitute,” he said.

Laches’s is the first reported business door to close in North Dakota because of the anti-smoking law.

He’ll be destitute and the custom cutters who pull in with harvest machinery and camper trailers will be in dire straits.

The nearest laundromat is less than 15 miles away in Regent, but good luck finding an open washing machine there.

The number of custom cutters who pull into that grain town makes Catholic-dominated Mott look like a Sunday school picnic for Baptists.

Jan Altendorf of Altendorf Harvesting said Laches’ decision is very devastating.

The crew of 30 she brings works 12 to 18 hours a day and they only get a few hours to run their clothing through the wash, maybe a few more if it rains.

Altendorf said the crewmembers don’t have their own transportation, so they walk uptown to the grocery store, laundromat and wherever else they need to go.

Now, she figures she’ll have to assign transportation and if the workers end up in Dickinson, well, everything’s fair game.

At that, a furrow of worry crossed the mayor’s brow,

“They’ll get to Wal-Mart (in Dickinson) and buy everything,” he said.

Altendorf said custom cutters, who hail from Africa, New Zealand and London, typically leave about 20 percent of their wage behind in towns from Texas to Canada.

She expects the inconvenience will be prolonged this year, because it looks like crop ripening will be slow and custom cutting crews will be around into September.

Laches said it wouldn’t have mattered to him if the local police never showed up to write him a ticket.

The law’s the law, he said.

After 17 years, “The state has taken my business away,” he said.

Hettinger County Sheriff Terry Marigny said he doesn’t plan to go looking for smokers in places like Laundromats and elsewhere.

But if he gets a complaint or if he encounters smoking where it shouldn’t be — and that’s any place open to the public, excluding bars that don’t have restaurant license, or have a permanent wall between the food and liquor areas — he’ll have to enforce the law.

Laches said for $10,000, he’d sell the building, lock, stock and wash barrel. He’d sell the wash and drying machines for $2,000.

He gets $1 a wash load because that’s all the coin boxes are set up for and they’re expensive to replace.

As he drove off from Laches’s place on the shady gravel roads of West Mott, Mosbrucker was talking about getting some guys together to buy machines and set up a laundromat somewhere in town.

Who knows, maybe some enterprising teens or home moms will step forward and make a few bucks doing custom cutters’ laundry at home.

Unless something is done, Mosbrucker said Mott will have a continued problem for the locals who depended on the laundromat and the hunters who will be coming in come October.

Mosbrucker said the new law will affect other Mott businesses and he’s hoping to get clarification on how bars that grill steaks will be treated in the anti-smoking law.

“It’s a struggle to keep businesses open in these small towns and they (the state) shut ’em down,” Mosbrucker said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 1-888-303-5511, or lauren@westriv.com.)
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/