County Board to tackle ban on smoking at Grygla meeting/BARF Alert!!

Smoking would be banned from all restaurants throughout Beltrami County under a draft ordinance commissioners will review Tuesday.

Beltrami County would become the second county in the state should the County Board adopt a countywide smoke-free restaurant ordinance.

The draft provides that "smoking is prohibited in all indoor areas of any restaurant and its indoor entrance areas, commonly referred to as vestibules, alcoves and foyers."

The issue won a significant hearing May 7 before a roomful of people in Bemidji, but Tuesday's review will be in one of the county's most remote spots - Our Saviors Lutheran Church in rural Grygla. Commissioners will review the draft ordinance as part its work session, with 4-5 p.m. set aside for discussion.

A host of health officials, including the county's own Public Health Nursing Service, provided testimony at the May 7 meeting about the danger of second-hand smoke for nearly 90 minutes.

"The group provided information related to the aspects of second-hand tobacco smoke and information related to smoke-free restaurants," County Administrator Tony Murphy states in a memo to commissioners. "While the County Board did not take any formal positions on this topic, the board asked the county attorney to research and prepare a draft smoke-free restaurant ordinance for further discussion."

County Attorney Tim Faver's draft ordinance would ban smoking in restaurants all over the county, including those in cities, and allow for criminal petty misdemeanor charges to be filed against violators.

The draft ordinance exempts bars from the ban, and defines bars as establishments in which sales of beer, malt liquor and intoxicating liquor is more than 50 percent of the total of net sales of food and beverages.

Also, bars connected to restaurants must be separated from restaurants on all sides by continuous floor-to-ceiling walls which are interrupted only by doors that can be closed. The bar ventilation system must also be separate from the restaurant, with the bar maintaining a negative air pressure in relation to the adjacent restaurant.

Other facilities that may be exempt from the ordinance include restaurants which are closed to the public while being used for a private function and private clubs, except when they are open to serve food or drink to the public who are not members of the club.

The draft also allows exemptions for an event that includes licensed food or beverage service in any municipal-owned and managed building, when the municipal governing body has declared specific portions of the building to be exempt for the event.

Businesses which seek to be exempt from the smoking ban must annually provide a report of food and liquor sales records as also provided to state revenue officials from the most recent liquor licensing year, the draft ordinance states.

New businesses wanting the exemption must file an affidavit with business plan projections that liquor sales will exceed 50 percent. If not within six months, then the new business must become smoke-free, the ordinance states.

Where smoking is allowed, proprietors under the ordinance must "conspicuously post" one of two signs:

"Warning - This area contains tobacco smoke, which causes cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and can harm you, your unborn baby and children."

Similarly, restaurants must post signs that state: "This entire establishment is smoke-free" and using the universal "no smoking" symbol.

"I recommend we move forward with this," County Board Chairwoman Vicki Haugen said after the May 7 presentation. "I really endorse this. I would like to see the board go ahead with a smoke-free restaurant ordinance in our county."

The measure has been controversial. The Pioneer maintains a Web site seeking commentary on the proposal, and as of Saturday, 213 reader opinions had been logged.

Smoke-free restaurant ordinances have passed in Olmstead County and in Cloquet, Duluth and Moose Lake. Efforts failed in Hutchinson, Little Falls and Shakopee.

Supporters of the Beltrami County ordinance want to model it after that in Olmstead County, which applies to restaurants as defined as having 50 percent or more of sales in food. The ordinance would exempt bars, as having less than 50 percent of sales in food.

"Smaller restaurants concern me," Commissioner Jack Frost, a resort owner, said in May. "They need to be competitive but have no wherewithal to provide separate facilities (for smokers and non-smokers.)"

In the rural area, especially at Pennington in his district, Frost said that "smoking is predominant."

In answer to a question from Commissioner Jim Heltzer, Faver said he believed the county could not hold a referendum on the issue since there is no provision for non-binding countywide ballot questions at taxpayer expense.

The reason behind the ordinance is to curb second-hand smoke, which Beltrami County Public Health Nursing Service Director Mary Marchel said is the third leading cause of death in the United States which is preventable.

"Second-hand smoke is a public health issue," she said, adding that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labeled second-hand smoke a Class A carcinogen and declared there is no safe level of exposure. Second-hand smoke contains more than 50 known dangerous carcinogens and 200 known poisons, she said.

Opponents, however, argue that government has no right telling a private business owner how to run his or her business. Banning smoking should be a voluntary matter, they say, and those who are bothered by smoke can choose to eat elsewhere.

Hmmmmm..... Posted on 07/08/2002 4:43 PM Pacific by patton

Kopel: Paper blowing scientific smoke

Post's coverage of possible smoking ban in Fort Collins comes up short on 'facts'

June 30, 2002

As Fort Collins considers banning smoking in restaurants and all other public indoor places, The Denver Post's Northern Colorado Bureau did a good job interviewing Fort Collins residents on all sides of the issue: smokers, anti-smokers and property owners (June 16). But the Post's coverage of the science regarding secondhand smoke was a litany of misinformation.

Making several serious errors in a single sentence, the Post asserted: "The Environmental Protection Agency classifies secondhand smoke as a cancer-causing substance with no safe level of exposure, causing 60,000 deaths each year in the United States."

First of all, the EPA's classification of secondhand smoke as a carcinogen was declared void in 1998 by a federal District Court. The court found that the EPA "manipulate\[d\] the Agency's standard scientific methodology," acted in "complete disregard of statutory procedure," engaged in "circular" reasoning, appeared to have " 'cherry picked' its data", "deliberately refused to assess information," evaded review by outside experts, "changed its methodology" without explanation in the middle of the study, relied on contradictory and shifting scientific theories, and rigged the report to support predetermined political conclusions. (4 F.Supp. 2d 435).

The Post's "no safe level of exposure" statement is technically true, but, in the context of the article, quite misleading. It's almost impossible to establish a safe level of exposure for anything. No one has ever proven that standing outside in the sunshine for just 100 hours over the course of your life won't give you skin cancer. Likewise, nobody has proven that inhaling secondhand smoke for 100 hours over the course of a lifetime won't give you cancer. But there is no scientific evidence showing that minimal exposure to sunlight or to secondhand smoke is dangerous, either.

The Post's sentence implied that the EPA believes that "cancer-causing" secondhand smoke causes 60,000 deaths annually. In fact, the EPA never made such an estimate. The 60,000 figure was created by a California state agency, which suggested that most of the deaths were due to heart disease, not cancer. Skeptics, including the author of an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1999, argue that these estimates are far too high: since passive smokers inhale only 1 percent as much as active smokers, their risks should be about 1 percent of the risk faced by active smokers.

The Post then cited a U.S. Surgeon General report "that secondhand smoke could cause fatal lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses, especially among young children." The Post's sentence structure implied that young children could get fatal lung cancer from secondhand smoke. To the contrary, the Surgeon General warned about lung cancer for adults and respiratory illness for children.

Reassuring restaurant owners worried about lower sales, the Post wrote: "A 1997 study conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that smoke-free ordinances in California and Colorado did not hurt restaurant or bar sales."

Actually, the study was published in 1994, based on data from 1986-91. A follow-up study conducted by Northwestern University economics professor Michael Evans found that the previous study had misclassified and misdescribed the laws in most of the cities studied, had failed to distinguish fast-food restaurants (which are mainly carry-out) from sit-down restaurants, and had made a variety of technical econometric errors. When the various flaws were corrected, the data showed a significant decline in restaurant business, which grew worse over time, Evans said. (The full texts of both studies are available on a Philip Morris Web site, www.pmoptions.com.) The 1994 authors, by the way, argue that their study is still valid, and that the identified errors are minor. (See www.no-smoke.org.)

Two good antidotes for media-induced panic over other people smoking are the books Passive Smoking: The EPA's Betrayal of Science and Policy (Vancouver: Fraser Institute), and For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health (N.Y.: Free Press). Jacob Sullum, author of the latter book, pointed me to some of the research cited in this column.

A letter writer (June 10) complained that the Post had allowed an opinion columnist to use the word "gypped," which, the letter writer alleged, is a slur against gypsies. Actually, the Oxford English Dictionary describes the origin of "gyp" as "unknown," rather than as derived from "gypsy." In any case, if a word was once an ethnic slur but no longer has that connotation, it is pointless for newspapers to worry about giving offense. Otherwise, papers are going to have to give up calling anyone a "piker" (originally, a Californian slur against newcomers from Pike County, Missouri) and newspapers will never be able to write about the destruction wrought by vandals - for fear of offending descendants of ancient Germanic tribesmen. Oops, I should have said "tribes-persons."

Dave Kopel is an attorney and author of 10 books published in both the popular and academic press. He can be reached at davekopel@ opinion.RockyMountainNews.com.

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