MADISON — Two dozen tables sit unused in a darkened dining room of Pedro’s Mexican Restaurant on Madison’s north side.
Pedro’s owner, Jim Martine, a Neenah native who learned the restaurant trade from his parents when they owned Martine’s restaurant in Appleton, recalls weekends when 200 customers from nearby shopping centers would crowd the dining room, reserved for smokers.
However, he said since Madison passed an ordinance banning smoking in restaurant dining rooms in 2002, those customers have gone elsewhere, along with the jobs needed to serve those customers.
Martine is anticipating a second, more significant financial hit when Madison’s recently passed workplace smoking ban, a strengthening of the 2002 law, takes effect in 2005.
The expanded ordinance will end smoking in the busy sports bar portion of his business.
“It will be devastating. Jobs will be lost,” he said.
Madison’s ban is being used as a model for Appleton’s proposed 100 percent indoor workplace smoking ban. A public hearing is set for the Appleton proposal at 6 p.m., Nov. 30, in the Appleton West High School auditorium, 610 N. Badger Ave.
“They (smoking ban advocates) are going to say Madison did this and it didn’t affect business. That’s not true. It did affect us,” Martine said. “I just hope Appleton doesn’t do to its businesses what Madison has done to us. What they’ve done to me has cost people their jobs.”
Steve Holtzman, the Madison alderman who authored that city’s most recent smoking ban, disagrees with Martine’s assertion that smoking bans are bad for business.
“You always have the industry complaining about a loss of revenue, but the restaurant industry in Madison is healthy,” he said.
According to the Madison City Clerk’s Office, the city has 991 licensed food and drink establishments, including 18 with annual revenues topping $5 million, 94 with revenues above $1 million and 486 with annual revenue of more than $100,000.
Holtzman said smoking is allowed at full-service bars where eating at the bar is considered incidental to the business.
He said the 2002 ordinance was watered down with exemptions making it “unintelligible and unenforceable” including confusing definitions of a bar and restaurant based on percentage of liquor sales. Restaurants with a high enough percentage of liquor sales could be defined as a bar and exempted from the ban.
“We found the percentages easy to manipulate, so in the 2004 ordinance we simply eliminated them and added taverns to the smoking ban to level the playing field for everyone,” Holtzman said.
A Sept. 8, 2003, analysis of the 2002 ordinance by the city’s environmental health department found that upon implementation of the ban, five large and popular restaurants suddenly upped their alcohol sales figures enough to be classified as taverns.
Restaurant operators fought the ban in various ways, according to the report, including one owner who met a requirement that no smoking signs be posted by writing the words on a small white sign in white ink “so no one could see them.”
“We tried to make allowances for full-service bars, but the restaurant industry betrayed us,” Holtzman said.
Holtzman said the Appleton Common Council needs to distinguish between health and economic impacts when considering its workplace smoking ban.
The council needs to review various national studies from other communities and states with bans.
“Elected officials in Appleton are going to have to show courage,” Holtzman said. “They are going to have to recognize the majority of people they represent don’t smoke and that a self-serving tavern industry should not be able to dictate standards for a community.
Martine, past president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, said restaurant owners should be allowed to make their own decisions.
Martine said a second Pedro’s restaurant he owns in Madison is smoke-free at the request of customers and the idea works.
“But I was forced to take smoking out of the dining room in my other restaurant and that has cost me a tremendous amount in sales,” he said.
The complexity of the issue was reflected by 72-year-old Boris Frank, who stopped in Skip Zach’s Avenue Tavern on Monday for lunch.
Frank, a non-smoker, munched on a roast beef sandwich in a booth a short distance from the ashtray-lined bar where a bartender smoked a cigarette.
“Personally, I favor a ban where there are groups coming in, especially where there is food,” Frank said. “But if people want to go to a smoking bar or some restaurant dedicated to smoking I have no problems with that personally.”
Frank lives in Paoli, a community of about 100 people south of Madison. He doesn’t patronize the town’s only bar/restaurant because it allows smoking.
“I think it’s been proven beyond a doubt that second-hand smoke is extremely dangerous,” Frank said. “We should be protecting the rights not only of the patrons, but also the people who work in terms of second-hand smoke exposure.”
The danger and annoyance of second-hand smoke is clear to Keith Daniels, owner of Harmony Grill and Bar, 2201 Atwood Ave., a 20-stool neighborhood bar and eatery on the city’s north side.
Daniels, a non-smoker, permits smoking in his business, but eagerly awaits the workplace smoking ban.
“I get tired of people blowing second-hand smoke in my face and the faces of my employees,” Daniels said. “I know the Wisconsin Tavern League isn’t pleased with me, but I support the ban.”
Daniels doesn’t fear a loss of business when smoking is banned, saying people go to bars to socialize and won’t sit home simply to smoke.
“I have a good friend who owns a bar in San Francisco where smoking was banned. He said he lost business for two months, but then saw it increase,” Daniels said.
Susan Breitbach, co-owner of Fyfe’s Corner Bistro, 1344 E. Washington St., said businesses are facing a tough battle, not only against smoking ban proponents, but themselves.
“You can’t win on this one. You don’t want to expose employees to anything they don’t want to be exposed to,” Breitbach said.
She said one of the biggest problems facing Madison bars and restaurants, a problem identical to one facing Appleton businesses, is being centered in a metropolitan area surrounded by communities without smoking bans.
“For those folks with businesses near the margins of Madison there will be a negative effect for whatever time it takes, and it could be years, for the patchwork of bordering communities to pass smoking bans,” Breitbach said. “It would be better if this was done on a statewide basis so you are not creating pockets of unfair competition.”
Fyfe’s has a large bar operation and separate, upscale dining rooms on two floors. The restaurant is classified among the top 110 in Madison with revenues between $1 million and $5 million.
Breitbach said it’s too early to tell if the Madison ban will lead to employee layoffs.
She urged Appleton aldermen to take a go-slow approach and encourage public participation.
“You are regulating private enterprise. You owe it to businesses to take the time and give everyone a say and come to a middle ground,” Breitbach said. “Council members need to be good listeners and ask questions of people negatively affected by the ordinance.”
Originally written By Steve Wideman
Post-Crescent staff writer
Post-Crescent staff writer
