Bar owners, customers want less-complicated smoking law
For more than two years, it has been illegal to smoke in restaurants, bars that serve food, malls, day care centers and other public places in Nevada.
Some people do it anyway. The Southern Nevada Health District has received 4,275 complaints about people smoking where they’re not supposed to since the ban went into effect in December 2006, said the agency’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Bethel.
But the Health District has not issued a single citation. Neither has the Nevada State Health Division.
No bars have been fined. No customers have been summoned into court. Nobody has gotten into trouble at all for flouting the law.
Why?
It’s complicated.
The law, as approved by voters in 2006, never specified how it would be enforced. Those regulations have yet to be written.
Couple that with a Clark County District Court judge’s decision soon after the law went into effect. Bar owners challenged the constitutionality of the law. Judge Douglas Herndon essentially ruled that the criminal provisions of the law were unconstitutional, but he upheld the civil penalties in the law.
This meant that the police would not be allowed to enforce the law.
That left only the possibility of civil citations in Clark County. The case might be resolved by the state Supreme Court, but then it could always be appealed to federal courts.
The Legislature is considering changing the law altogether. Changes could include opening up some bars to smoking, reconfiguring how the law is enforced, and disallowing local jurisdictions to enact regulations that are tougher than the state law.
All of this leaves local and state health authorities unable to do much, they say. But they’re trying.
“We are going ahead and training our staff, getting ready to set up enforcement procedures,” said Bethel, the local health district spokeswoman.
The district is training its staff of inspectors — the people who do restaurant inspections already — to search out smokers and cite them.
She couldn’t say when the training might be complete, or when enforcement might actually begin.
The state health division, responsible for the 15 rural counties, is still working on drafting regulations, spokeswoman Martha Framsted said. The law itself is vague; regulations must be written to cover the specifics of how to enforce it.
She said the agency held a public workshop seeking input on proposed regulations last year. Tavern owners were so vociferous in their opposition, she said, that the proposal was scrapped and a new one is still being worked on.
But she said rural establishments have been compliant, anyway. She did not have figures available on how many complaints the division has received.
Christopher Roller, director of advocacy for the American Heart Association in Nevada, said his group and others that pushed hard for the law’s passage are disappointed that it is not being enforced, but they understand.
The lack of criminal penalties because of the court decision “really threw a monkey wrench into enforcement,” Roller said.
He said if the proposed changes making their way through the Legislature right now eventually become law, it will make enforcement all the more difficult.
The changes, as proposed and passed by a state Senate committee last week, put all responsibility for enforcement with the state Health Division, which Roller called chronically underfunded and understaffed. In Clark and Washoe counties, the division has virtually no presence.
Joe Wilcock, who owns the Brewery Bar and Grill on East Sunset Road, said he and other tavern owners have had little trouble from the health authorities.
With their help in the design, Wilcock said he spent $60,000 remodeling his facility to comply with the law, separating the restaurant portion, where smoking is not allowed, from the bar portion, where smoking is allowed as long as no food is served.
Wilcock called the law, which he blames for a 15 to 30 percent drop in his business, “toothless” because of the court decision.
“We don’t have a problem with whoever is going to enforce this thing. We just want to make sure they do it without all the vagueness.”
Source: Lvrj
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