It's a compromise everyone can agree upon.
Almost everyone, anyway. But we'll get to that later.
The proposal in question is an amendment to New York's smoking ban introduced earlier this month by a state Sen. Ray Meier, a Republican whose district includes parts of Oneida, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties. As written, the bill would allow bars at which food accounts for less than 40 percent of total sales to permit smoking if they install equipment that filters air to near-pristine quality.
Several companies offer filtration equipment, designed to deal with acts of bioterrorism such as an anthrax attack, that has been shown to remove 99.97 percent of the contaminants from the air almost instantaneously. Cost for a unit capable of handling an average-sized establishment -- $3,000.
More important than the bill's specifics is its list of co-sponsors: 13 prominent Republicans, including George Maziarz (North Tonawanda) and fellow Western New Yorker Dale Volker (Depew).
Maziarz signed on after seeing a demonstration in an Albany conference room. With the filtration equipment running, a manufacturer's representative turned on a smoke machine that instantly produced more exhaust than a roomful of Marlboro puffers. Just as quickly, the smoke vanished.
"It worked pretty well," Maziarz said. "There was no trace of smoke."
While no corresponding bill has yet been introduced in the state Assembly, the equipment demonstrations have drawn attention in that house, as well. RoAnne Destino, a Democrat whose district overlaps with Meier's, is pondering introducing a similar measure.
While Democrat Francine Del Monte has not yet signed on as a co-sponsor, she told the Niagara Falls Reporter that the filtration gear could provide middle ground in one of the most politically contentious statewide debates in years.
"If this equipment works as well as it's been profiled, it might offer the happy compromise everyone is looking for," she said.
An amendment backed by members of the majority in each party -- the same caucuses that rammed the original ban into law in record time nearly a year ago -- could push the amendment through just as easily.
"I think that what this will take care of those types of bars and taverns where the mainstay is not food, whose business was impacted the worst by this," Maziarz said. "It wasn't anyone's intention to hurt those places."
Maziarz didn't rule out expanding the bill to include restaurants that provide a completely separate non-smoking area.
Some ban opponents worry that without such an amendment to the amendment, larger restaurants may actively oppose the bill in fear that they'd lose business to the mom-and-pop corner bars.
"That would divide us and possibly defeat the bill," said Judi Justiana of Judi's Lounge. "The formula of 40 percent food and 60 percent alcohol would exclude a lot of businesses. And it doesn't include billiard halls, or small places with no alcohol sales.
"Why have those limitations if the system really works? As long as the employees are breathing clean air -- the figure is 99.9 percent pure air, as good as if not better than operating room quality -- the 'true goal' of protecting our workers would be met."
Which brings us to the people certain to most vocally oppose any relaxation of the nation's strictest smoking ban. Anti-smokers fervently worked to push state lawmakers into overstepping the bounds of the government-business relationship in establishing the prohibition in the first place. They're certainly not going to give it up without a fight.
The concept of "protecting workers" is one of the arguments for the ban that carries as much intellectual weight as President Bush's pre-invasion implication that Iraq had nuclear warheads ready to sneak into the United States. "You're protecting me right out of a job," reads one T-shirt popular among bar and restaurant employees involved in protesting the ban since its imposition last July.
But logic and reason have little to do with the anti-smoking campaign. It's all about winning, about imposing their will and satisfying a savage addiction to self-righteousness.
Their goal has never been protecting workers. It's been to make smokers stop smoking, no matter how many business get snuffed out in the process.
They cite empty statistics that blame every cancer death on smoking or second-hand smoke, figures that long ago lost all meaning to anyone who actually looks at them.
They point to increased overall tax revenues for food and beverage sales as evidence that the ban isn't so destructive, ignoring the simple fact that people go to a large restaurant with very different motives than when they walk into a neighborhood tavern.
Even the Niagara Gazette flip-flopped its editorial position last week, calling for the ban's repeal. This from a newspaper whose editorials since the ban's inception repeatedly called those who oppose the ban "whiners" -- a favorite rhetorical flourish of the paper's exiled former editor -- and whose stories on the issue generally focused on a few anecdotal cases of businesses that had done well by not allowing smoking, while ignoring those that have already gone under or teeter on the brink.
With even the very legislators who voted for the ban and media outlets who blindly accepted it finally seeing the flaws that make it untenable, the anti's find themselves outnumbered and outflanked.
At the very least, the issue will get a proper airing in a public debate, something the anti's spent plenty of money and effort to make sure didn't occur when pushing through the original prohibition.
"That is going to happen this time," Maziarz said.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 16 2004 |