on 8/26/04 11:33 PM, List Manager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: > Here is my understanding of where the ban is at: > > Its my understanding, that the smoking ban could be acted upon as > soon as next week. However, according to today's paper, the ban as it > currently stands is only likely to gather 4 votes. Which is not > enough to override a veto by Mayor Kelly. It appears that Mayor Kelly > will veto the ban as it is currently worded. > > The compromise ban, that allowed smoking is some establishments was > pulled off the table by Dan Bostrom, who apparently didn't like an > amendment that had been attached to it. > > Do I have this right?
Sort of. Dan may not have liked the amendment which changed the percentage of liquor sales required for exemption from 50% to some significantly higher number - like 70% - meaning that it would have to be very much a liquor-serving bar and very little food to be let off the hook. Fifty percent would have exempted far too many. But no percentage is adequate for the public health. The real reason Dan pulled his bill is that his version never secured a required majority of four votes to pass. He never lobbied any one of his colleagues to negotiate his provisions to secure a compromise one of the other four could live with, something any reasonable legislator knows he or she must do to gain the necessary votes for passage. So they never materialized. This was Kelly's bill, not Bostrom's, anyway. Bostrom almost never proposes legislation. Dan was also sick as a dog Wednesday, ashen and woozy. We hope it is merely a flu. The issue of the Thune bill is that it exempts no bar or restaurant, and, because Randy Kelly disingenuously vetoed a bill that actually represented the regional uniformity he keeps claiming he wants (the smoking rooms were easily extracted without vetoing - or allowing an override, then amending the rooms out), Thune's measure will get the four votes to pass, but not five to override. Kelly has claimed all along that he was opposed to Thune's bill because he didn't want St. Paul isolated from the rest of the region in slapping a smoking ban on bars and restaurants only in his city, especially with the allowance for smoking rooms. What makes that a disingenuous and manipulative posture is his continued dancing around the very conditions now presented to him by the total bans in Bloomington and Minneapolis (and soon, all of Hennepin County). To prevent St. Paul from joining those two largest cities in the state as the core of a regional solution is unforgivable, not only because he lied about his reasons for a veto and his assertions that regional solutions were necessary not to put St. Paul bar owners and restaurateurs at a disadvantage, but because he'd be getting with his insistence on exemptions the very mish-mash of ordinances and laws he had claimed would be bad policy. He was right, by the way; he simply vetoed (voted) directly opposite of his lip service. The incredible stubbornness of the rude and boisterous bar owners who heckled Dave Thune and his colleagues at the public hearing Wednesday evening is indicative of just one thing: their smoke-filled rooms serve as a boost to alcohol sales; smoking would not be the deciding factor for their customers to continue patronizing their joints. Ninety-nine percent of them patronize a bar because for the company they keep and the food they eat, not just whether smoking is allowed. No decent drinker or smoker can deny that a drink makes a smoker want to light up and that the smoking makes them want another drink. And so it goes: have a drink, light up, order another drink, light up again, and so on. It's a hand-in-glove proposition that by their addictions they will be drunker and sicker for their evening in a barroom - both dangerous states of mind and judgment when the evening ends. But bar owners don't really care that this behavior is a threat not only to the health of their workers and their customers, but to the public at-large as well, because, of course, the more sodden the customer, the more dangerous he or she is heading home behind the wheel. No. The profits from alcohol sales are too huge, and the loss of smoking that spawns far higher per capita consumption of alcohol means that those profits would have to be replaced with additional customers. Besides, bar owners don't believe new customers will actually start coming in for smoke-free socializing. If any governmental unit, including St. Paul, Ramsey County and Dakota County, is thoughtless enough to pass bans with exceptions based on unenforceable percentages of alcohol vs. food sales, they're all inviting unnecessary lawsuits by the dozens. The line between the two can be altogether too fine - and some bar is going to fall under the smoking ban when they think they shouldn't and/or when their competition across the street is considered exempt, perhaps by just a few dollars in liquor sales. It's unfair to all of them to create an exemption for any of them, and the costs of enforcement as well as the costs in health care, insurance rates and potential lawsuits inherent with selective exemptions would be a fiscal disaster lying in wait. With exemptions, somebody gets screwed. Without exemptions, some will think they're screwed, but they won't be because the law will be applied uniformly and no one can cry "foul." St. Paul citizens should tell Randy Kelly, Councilmembers Debbie Montgomery, Pat Harris and Dan Bostrom and Ramsey County Commissioners Rafael Ortega, Victoria Reinhardt and Jan Wiessner that they are toying with such disaster if they pass the Olmsted County (Rochester) model ordinance, especially when Minneapolis and Bloomington and all of Hennepin County will be the places St. Paul/Ramsey County residents go for safer and more comfortable smoke-free dining, drinking and socializing. All of this is over and above the basic reason for the smoking ban: worker safety and public health. It is the responsibility of government to protect both, libertarian smokers and bar owners notwithstanding. In fact, even if, as some bar owners and union leaders claim, 75% or so of bar employees don't want the ban, too bad. I don't believe it, but it doesn't make any difference. Sometimes we must be protected from our own inclinations to self-destruct. Lord knows that here, in the heart of the recovery belt, most of us have learned that our own judgment for self-preservations is out of whack under the influence of these drugs - nicotine and alcohol. Call these people and tell them what their duty to their people is really about. Andy Driscoll Crocus Hill/Ward 2 ------ _____________________________________________ To Join: St. Paul Issues Forum Rules Discussion Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _____________________________________________ NEW ADDRESS FOR LIST: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, modify subscription, or get your password - visit: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/listinfo/stpaul Archive Address: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/private/stpaul/
