People Ban: AK Anchorage Page 3

Anchorage voters embrace smoking ban

April 3, 2007
By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA

You can still do pretty much what you want in bars — drink, shoot pool, sing off-tune karaoke. But you can’t smoke. Not after July 1.

Anchorage voters Tuesday endorsed a new city law that outlaws smoking in bars and bingo halls, among other public places. They soundly defeated an attempt to repeal the law, with more than two-thirds voting to keep it.

“It’s a resounding win,” said Anchorage Assemblyman Dick Traini, a sponsor of the no-smoking-in-bars ordinance, as he watched the returns come in at the Egan Convention Center. “So I’m looking for a big smoke-out in July. It will be a good day for the town.”

Zach Keeton, a Libertarian who led the effort to repeal the law, said while he is disappointed, “At least the people had the right to vote on it.”

The Anchorage Assembly adopted the new no-smoking rules last summer, but the Assembly gave the businesses until this summer to comply. That left time for an initiative against the ban to make it onto the city election ballot.

The restriction on smoking in bars and bingo halls expands a 2001 city law that already prohibited smoking in most public buildings, such as restaurants, offices and government buildings.

Bars and bingo parlors were among the last public places left where smokers could light up. The new rules also make it illegal to smoke within 50 feet of municipal buildings, in private clubs that use employees and in homes where child care is offered.

The smoking debate mostly came down to smokers’ rights versus public health concerns.

Jean Sauget, 51, a computer programmer voting at the Spenard Recreation Center, said she wanted to repeal the ban “because if a person has a bar and chooses to let people smoke, I don’t have to go there.”

Gloria Fairbanks, 55, also of Spenard, voted to keep the law because other peoples’ smoking affects her, too, she said. “I don’t want them to smoke.”

Treg Taylor, 30, of Sand Lake, said the smoking decision was hard to make. “I was torn between people having the right to choose, but it’s public places,” he said.

A group supporting the new law, Keep Anchorage Workplaces Smokefree, raised more than $121,000 in donations to campaign to keep it on the books. Their ads featured a local lung doctor, a heart doctor and a cancer doctor, all telling voters that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and heart disease.

Influential health organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association of Alaska and the American Heart Association backed the Smokefree group.

Keeton founded a group called Stomp the Ban to try to overturn the ban. He saw the smoking rules as a step toward fewer personal freedoms.

Stomp the Ban raised a couple thousand dollars.

When the Assembly was considering the smoking ban last summer, bar and bingo-hall owners came out in force to argue against it.

After losing at the Assembly, a group of the bingo-hall owners and a few bar owners took a poll, said Jack Powers, owner of Tudor Road Bingo Center Casino. The poll showed that Anchorage voters were not going to overturn the ban, said Powers. So some opponents of the ban decided not to spend more time or money, he said.

“They win, we lose, that’s the end of it,” he said.

Powers still believes bingo halls are going to lose money, at least on pull-tab revenue. People will be going out to smoke during breaks instead of staying at the pull-tab counter, he thinks.

“That’s where we’re going to get hurt.”

Supporters have said that studies show smoking bans don’t hurt businesses.

So what’s next?

Assemblyman Traini said he does not plan to pursue further restrictions on smoking.

“I think this is sufficient,” he said. “We did what we wanted to do — we’ve taken care of second-hand smoke.”

Reporter Rosemary Shinohara can be reached at rshinohara@adn.com or 257-4340.

April 1, 2007
By KYLE HOPKINS, Anchorage Daily News

Zach Keeton, a 24-year-old libertarian with a military haircut, doesn’t believe adults should be forced to wear seat belts or helmets. He thinks people should be able to buy any kind of gun they want.

Dick Traini, an Air Force veteran serving his 10th year on the Anchorage Assembly, is against helmet and seat-belt laws too. He collects machine guns.

You’d think these guys would get along. But there’s one thing they disagree on, and it’s among the most-debated questions of Tuesday’s citywide election:

Should a new ban on smoking in bars, bingo halls, private clubs and nearly every other public building be erased before it starts?

Traini and the Assembly voted 8-3 last summer to adopt the anti-smoking rules, with support from hospitals, the local chamber of commerce and an army of nonprofit groups. The goal was to protect workers and kids from dangerous secondhand smoke, fight off expensive smoking-related medical bills and join a growing number of cities that outlaw cigarettes in public buildings.

Keeton and his friends soon collected thousands of signatures from people who wanted to repeal the ban, which is scheduled to start July 1. Some of their supporters were businesses worried about losing customers, smokers angry at losing the last few places they could still light up and other libertarians who saw a case of government trampling their dwindling rights.

The debate isn’t new. Seven years ago, the Assembly voted to ban smoking in restaurants and most workplaces, and now both sides say the issues are the same — public health versus personal choice.

PERSONAL FREEDOM

On a recent weeknight, roughly 25 people perched on stools and played pool downtown at the smoky Pioneer Bar. Keeton sat tapping his lighter on a tabletop, next to a black plastic ashtray.

If the new anti-smoking rules survive Tuesday’s vote, the smoke and the ashtray should be gone in midsummer.

Whether the smokers will leave too is under debate.

Assemblyman Dan Coffey, who co-sponsored the new rules, said he reviewed dozens of studies that show smoking bans don’t hurt business in cities like Anchorage. Opponents of the ban, such as Blues Central owner Frank Dahl, remain unconvinced and say the city is gambling with their livelihood.

Either way, people won’t be allowed to smoke in the bar anymore, and if they go outside, they must puff at least five feet from the doorway.

Keeton said he’s tried to quit smoking a few times. His wife wishes he would, and at first he didn’t understand why he picked this fight with the city.

“I’m not a horrible person,” Keeton said. He sees the smoking rules as one step on a slippery slope toward over-regulation and fewer personal freedoms. Next, trans fats will be banned, he said. Then there will be rules for eating fast food or drinking alcohol. Maybe mandatory citywide workout days.

“Let me choose, let me live how I want to live my life,” he said. “If I want to smoke in a bar, you know, around consenting adults that choose to be in there, let me do that.”

As he talked, Keeton gestured to a pack of Camels lying on the table.

He asked: “You don’t mind, do you?”

PUBLIC SAFETY

On a recent weekday afternoon, Midtown Assemblyman Dick Traini sat in an empty conference room in City Hall. A few floors below, voters cast early ballots in the city election.

Traini and other smoking-ban advocates say they’re fighting for people’s rights too: The right to breathe clean air when you’re in a public place.

“Public safety and health override personal property rights,” he said.

When he talks about Anchorage’s smoking rules, Traini sometimes brings up his family. Both of his parents were smokers. His father, who died of lung disease, would clear his throat for half an hour each morning before taking his first drag of the day. They never made the connection between his asthma and their cigarettes, Traini said.

To make his point, Traini paged through a phone book-sized digest that the ban’s supporters consider their smoking gun — the Surgeon General’s 2006 report on secondhand smoke. Traini’s copy is well-worn.

Among the passages he has highlighted with a blue marker are: “Exposure to secondhand smoke remains an alarming public health hazard …” And: “Nonsmokers need protection through the restriction of smoking in public places and workplaces …”

Keeton said workers choose to work in potentially dangerous environments, from coal mines to crab boats, all the time.

Eric Myers is chairman of Keep Anchorage Workplaces Smokefree, a group formed to support the smoking ban. Just as smoking-ban opponents argue that the new rules could mean fewer jobs for bar and bingo hall employees, Myers asked what happens when, say, a woman who works in a smoking bar gets pregnant.

Should she be forced to leave her job, he said. “It puts workers in an unreasonable position.”

THE MONEY

In a relatively bloodless city election season, the smoking debate has attracted attention — more than one Assembly candidate said it helped spur him to run for office — and money. Keep Anchorage Workplaces Smokefree had collected more than $121,000 in donations as of early last week.

Individuals gave small contributions and groups such as the American Cancer Society and the AARP gave thousands.

A political action committee called Alaskans for Freedom of Choice formed this year and, using money mostly from the bingo industry, Keeton said, conducted a poll about the ban but soon dissolved. Stomp the Ban, the group Keeton founded, had raised about $2,000 as of last week, enough to air radio ads.

Even if voters defeat his repeal effort, Keeton said, he’s glad to see people debating and talking about the ban. The Alaska Libertarian Party, with members running in two Assembly races, has been talking about other issues to tackle, such as eminent domain and petitioning laws, he said.

“I think this is really just the beginning of something.”

And what about the city’s smoking rules? If this new ban is confirmed by voters Tuesday, is it the end of the limitations on smoking, or are more to come?

“This is enough right now,” Traini said. “But I can’t tell you what future Assemblies are going to do.”

Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins can be reached at khopkins@adn.com.
Here’s what ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ means

• Vote Yes if you want to block new rules to ban smoking in bars, bingo halls and almost all other public buildings.

• Vote No if you like the new ban and want it to start this summer, as scheduled.

Law as of July 1 unless repealed Tuesday

Smoking allowed

In private residences, unless child care is offered

In 25 percent of hotel and motel rooms

In private clubs where no one is employed and events are not open to the public

At outdoor work sites except arenas, stadiums and amphitheaters

No smoking allowed

In all enclosed public spaces with the above exceptions

In all indoor workplaces

In outdoor seating areas of arenas, stadiums and amphitheaters

In private homes and elsewhere where child care is offered

A minimum of 20 feet from any place where smoking is outlawed

A minimum of 50 feet from hospital or clinic entrances or any municipal buildings

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City revises ads about smoking ban

March 29, 2007

ANCHORAGE — A group that wants to repeal new anti-smoking rules in Anchorage has settled its lawsuit with the city.

The dispute was over the way the city was describing in public ads a proposition on next Tuesday’s ballot — whether to stop a ban on smoking in most public places.

A group called Stomp the Ban, which put the question on the ballot in the first place, said the city was campaigning against it by presenting only one side of the issue in notices posted on the city Web site and in the newspaper.

Stomp the Ban founder Zach Keeton said this week that he — with Assembly candidate Alex Crawford, who filed the lawsuit — had settled with the city in state Superior Court. The city agreed to alter the public notice.

The city will delete a line that said the smoking ban “would reduce state and federal government costs for Medicare and Medicaid payments associated with smoking-related diseases.”

The city will add these lines:

• “There are no direct measures of the expected economic benefits of expanding the Anchorage smoking ban.”

• “Some local business owners, including non-profits, bingo halls, bars and tobacco shops, testified before the Anchorage Assembly that they believed the expanded smoking ban would have a negative economic impact on them.”

“Just to ensure the integrity of the election, we’re working with the Stomp the Ban folks to provide as much information and balance as possible,” said assistant city attorney Robert Owens.

Asked whether the changes are being made partly to make sure the election’s outcome isn’t disputed in court, he said they were.

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