Johnson: Smoke ban inspires 'who's on 1st' routine

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, April 28, 2007

The legislature's quest to outlaw smoking in Colorado fascinates mostly because of the sheer inequality involved. Then there's the stumblings and fumblings by elected leaders trying to salvage last year's poorly written, special interest-protecting law, and, finally, the quite avoidable human and economic toll the folly has exacted.

A smoker these days could go crazy trying to figure out where it is lawful to light up. Are casinos smoke-free now or not? Cigar bars? How come they smoke in that bar, but not in this one?

Over at the Capitol on Friday morning, the Senate was attempting yet again to decide whether to ban smoking in, of all places, cigar bars. Amendments were added; rules were changed. Not a single head went unscratched. It was kind of funny.

There was more huddling taking place than on a fall Sunday. "If you ban smoking there, you've got to allow it here," some murmured and others shouted.

Who's on first?

No, he's on second.

The bill to outlaw smoking in cigar bars and rid the myriad of exemptions granted in last year's bill finally went up in flames shortly before noon.

I think. It was hard to know.

I approached Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, to ask why he had been so passionate only a month earlier in killing any bill that didn't exempt small mom-and-pop bars and taverns but had just voted minutes earlier to eliminate such an exemption.

He stammered. And then he sighed, shrugged and said something about too many procedural rules, of deals being cut, of different ideas being tossed around.

"No," he finally muttered, "I'm telling Sen. (Betty) Boyd, (the bill's sponsor) to forget it. I'm not voting with her."

Who's on first?

The legislature on Thursday did close perhaps the most unfair, logic-defying loophole in the so-called Clean Air Act when it outlawed smoking in the state's casinos.

Ah, but there is a catch.

Casinos have until January of next year to go smokeless, a sop the legislature would not even consider for less-well-heeled bar and tavern owners like Mike Broncucia, who has run Mickey's Top Sirloin on West 70th Avenue and Broadway for 45 years.

I visited him on Friday to see if he had again set out the ashtrays in the aftermath of Adams County Judge Robert Doyle's ruling two weeks ago that the smoking ban was unconstitutional because it denied bar and tavern owners equal protection.

The bar inside the Top Sirloin was sparsely populated, as it has been since the smoking ban went into effect. There were no ashtrays lining it.

"The D.A. has told us he is appealing the ruling and not to light up," said Mike Broncucia, 70, one of the most ardent opponents of the smoking ban. "I think they are still writing tickets in Adams County."

The ban arrived at the worst possible time for him. He had just torn down the original Top Sirloin and replaced it with a sprawling new restaurant.

In half of the building he installed state-of-the-art ventilators and smoke-eaters at a cost of more than $13,000. They sit idle today.

He pulls a stack of records showing he has been losing at least $3,000 a month from previous years, solely because of the smoking ban.

"Some of it has come back," Mike Broncucia says, bitterness accompanying each word, "but only because I opened a patio and put heaters out there in the winter. Is it like it was before? Not even close."

Like every struggling bar owner I have spoken to over the past year, he rails at the purported reason behind the smoking ban: protecting workers' health.

"What - those people working in the smoking lounge at the airport, in the cigar bars and the casinos - smoke doesn't bother them? It's a joke. And when our ban went into effect, they didn't give us a grace period. Politicians . . . "

I ask Karen Smith, 42, who has worked the bar at the Top Sirloin for 12 years if her health has improved in the nine months she has worked behind the smoke-free bar.

She just laughed.

"I never minded it. Now, I just make less money. Maybe they were protecting me from financial health."

Mike Broncucia and I sit at his brand new bar - finding a stool is not difficult like in the old days - and he reminisces.

"A lot of people just quit drinking in bars. That's all that's happened," Mike Broncucia says.

"You know, the older crowd for years would come in first thing, have a couple of beers and a few cigarettes. I used to open up for them at 8. Now I don't open the doors until 11.

"I don't know what happened to them. All I know is no matter what a judge says or the politicians do, I doubt that they would ever come back."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763