New Smoking Law Targets Job Areas : Larger Businesses in County Territory Must Maintain Smoke-Free Sections

The Orange County Board of Supervisors Tuesday passed an ordinance requiring businesses with 10 or more employees in unincorporated areas of the county to set up no-smoking areas for their workers.

The board voted 4 to 0, with newly appointed Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez abstaining, to require employers to make “reasonable efforts” to develop and promulgate no-smoking policies that comply with the ordinance, which will not take effect until Nov. 1.

The vote capped years of debate.

The Orange County Chamber of Commerce fought unsuccessfully against the ordinance, contending that businesses’ voluntary efforts would solve the problem. The chamber also declined to help draft the ordinance, which carries a maximum penalty of $100 a day for each violation.

The county already had ordinances establishing no-smoking areas in buildings it owns or leases and in restaurants with a capacity of 50 or more people. Eight of the 26 cities in Orange County also have laws regulating smoking in the workplace.

County officials said 1980 statistics showed a total of 684 businesses employing 10 or more people each in unincorporated areas, with a total of 36,350 employees.

The law requires that smoking be banned in elevators, restrooms, hallways, conference rooms, auditoriums and at least half the space in cafeterias, lunchrooms and employee lounges.

It gives any employee the right to designate his or her work area a no-smoking location and specifies that “in any dispute arising under the smoking policy, the health concerns of the nonsmoker shall be given precedence.”

Exempt from the ordinance are bars, hotel and motel rooms rented to guests, stores selling tobacco exclusively and private, enclosed office workplaces occupied exclusively by smokers, even though they may be visited by nonsmokers.

Restaurants also are exempt because they are governed by the previous law covering no-smoking areas for the public.

Jules Kerker, an insurance agent who spearheaded the battle for a no-smoking ordinance and pestered supervisors over the years to pass one, urged the board Tuesday to set up no-smoking areas in the main men’s jail in Santa Ana.

Although jail officials have insisted that barring smoking would cause a riot among inmates, Kerker said cigarette smoke causes a “contaminated and poisonous atmosphere” in the jail, making it “unfit for human habitation.”

He contended that foul air causes aggression and violence and that “if the word got around the community that the jail was a no-smoking area,” it could cause some smokers to avoid a life of crime for fear of winding up behind bars and being unable to smoke.