Evidence elusive as smoking debate rages

How would a blanket smoking ban as proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in bars, restaurants, pool halls and private clubs affect business in New York City?
It depends on whom you ask.
Bloomberg, when testifying to the City Council’s health committee two weeks ago, said that the ban would be good for business.
“Movie theatres, concert halls, museums, airplane terminals and train stations, sports stadiums and arenas, and, since 1995, thousands of eating establishments comprising more than half of the total number of restaurants in New York City,” the mayor said.
“There is no evidence that prohibiting smoking has reduced attendance or income at those venues. Some public opinion surveys have suggested that many more New Yorkers would go out more often if bars and nightclubs become smoke-free.”
Not so, say bar and restaurant owners. Ciaran Staunton, owner of O’Neill’s bar in Midtown Manhattan, said that a ban on smoking would reduce his till receipts by “as much as 20 percent. That will put me out of business.”
On Staten Island, John Mulvey, who owns Bridget’s Public House, said that 60 percent of his customers are smokers.
“If 30 percent of them stop coming, then my business will lose 30 percent and that will put me out of business.”
Mulvey added that he had a 3-year-old daughter and “I just opened my cable bill this morning and it has gone up 100 percent.”
Mulvey said that the first thing that suffers when bars and restaurants are doing badly — his own bar business, he said, is still down 10 percent from Sept. 11 — are the local charities, the Little League, the Knights of Columbus and the local parish, “because we can’t afford to give to them anymore.”
But Bloomberg’s approach has been to stress the health aspect of his proposed local law 256. The important thing he has said is protecting the health of waiters and waitresses, bartenders and other bar workers in the city.
However, anecdotal or otherwise, it is the economic argument that has been making the most impact on council members who are still sitting on the fence about the proposed ban.
“Many council members were not aware how small bars and restaurants operate,” Staunton said recently in between helping to seat people at his bar-restaurant. “We have showed them how we operate in the neighborhoods and the small margins we operate on.”
Bar owners, including Staunton, warn against accepting certain facts at face value. They point to the evidence from the state of California, which banned smoking in bars and restaurants in 1995. Official figures cited by the mayor and other advocates since the ban there have shown that bar and restaurants saw an increase in business.
“Of course business picked up in California,” Staunton said. “But when they passed the ban in California there was a statewide depression followed by a boom in the late 1990s, so all businesses went up. That is what we have found, except that the bars and restaurants still suffered.”
Bar owners in California have confirmed this, although hard numbers are hard to come by.
Pat White, a native of County Clare, once owned nine bars in San Francisco and now has four. One bar, he said, was closed because the city’s health department successfully sued it for being a public nuisance, not because of smoking inside the bar but because so many patrons were standing outside the bar to have a cigarette.
“I am selling the rest of the bars because I am fed up trying to do business in this city,” White said. “I would say that business went down 20, 25 percent. The ban came in five years ago and then was seriously enforced two to three years ago. More people started drinking more at home, where they can still smoke.”
Anti-smoking advocates have been adamant that a blanket ban would leave all bars and restaurants on a level playing field. Therefore, they say, any economic impact would be neutralized. And they and the mayor continue to present the issue as a health one, not an economic one.
“If you want to kill yourself, go ahead and do it,” Bloomberg told City Council members in testimony this month. “But you don’t have a right to kill others. We’re trying to protect workers in New York City.”
It seems that the hard evidence may not be collated unless and until, and if, Bloomberg’s ban is made law, after which bar owners say they will face both fewer customers spending less time in the bars and the probability, according to figures cited by the United Restaurant and Liquor Dealers Association of New York, as much as $3,400 fines for three smoking violations.
“I hate smoking,” said Staunton at a recent meeting of restaurant and liquor dealers, “but this is my business.”