By Steve Huffman
shuffman@salisburypost.com
It’ll be next week before North Carolina legislators debate the issue of new restrictions on smoking, this in a state that remains the country’s largest grower of tobacco.
Legislators said the issue was supposed to have come before N.C. House members Thursday, but debate about the proposed bill has been bumped to next Wednesday.
Two of the three legislators who represent Rowan County say they’ll oppose any new restrictions on smoking while the third said he has yet to make up his mind on the issue.
State Rep. Lorene Coates (R-Rowan) said a business owner already has the right to make a restaurant nonsmoking.
“We don’t need to mandate everything from Raleigh,” Coates said.
The bill, being pushed by health advocates, would outlaw smoking in the workplace, including restaurants and other public places.
About two dozen states and the District of Columbia have approved laws banning smoking in nearly all work sites and public places, according to the American Lung Association. A limited ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in tobacco-friendly Virginia passed earlier this month.
The growing tide against tobacco twice before seemed ready to reach into the North Carolina legislature, where smoke-filled rooms were common a decade ago. But legislation in 2005 and 2007 failed to bar secondhand smoke from workplaces around a state full of small towns that grew up alongside highly profitable tobacco farms.
In recent years, North Carolina lawmakers have banned smoking inside prisons, state government buildings and state-owned vehicles. Smoking is widely banned from offices where white-collar employees work.
But secondhand smoke is more common for blue-collar employees, and only about a third of the state’s hospitality workers have a smoke-free environment.
N.C. Sen. Andrew Brock (R-Davie) said he agreed with Coates that a decision to ban smoking in virtually all public places wasn’t called for.
“I told one restaurant owner, ‘If you want to ban smoking, you can,’ ” he said. “I don’t think the state should dictate what you do in your own business. I don’t think we have any business going after private-property rights.”
Brock said the matter boils down to one of simple economics. If enough customers want a restaurant or similar business to be nonsmoking, he said, the business owner will eventually decide to make it nonsmoking.
Brock said Virginia’s newly-passed law makes all restaurants nonsmoking, but he said the owner of an individual business can revert the place to smoking if he desires.
“I think that’s what it should come down to,” Brock said. “Ultimately, the law of economics are going to win.”
Under the measure to be considered by legislators, smokers could be fined up to $50 if they kept puffing after being warned, and if a local health official received a complaint and followed through with a citation. If the bill becomes law, business owners or managers could be fined up to $200 by a local health director after a third violation.
N.C. Rep. Fred Steen (R-Rowan) said the proposed bill is going through several variations, and said the measure is likely to continue to change markedly before being presented to House members for a vote.
Steen said he is still studying the measure.
“I don’t know, I’m kind of open,” he said of the direction in which he’s leaning. “I want to look at the positives and negatives. I want to make the best decision I can for the state.”
Steen said he’s read of studies in Colorado that showed a 41 percent reduction in heart attacks in that state after a similar smoking ban was put in place. That same study concluded, Steen said, that business to bars and restaurants increased following the ban.
“I think it’s going to continue to morph,” Steen said of changes to the bill before a vote on the matter takes place.