Council Rejects Ban on Smoking in Restaurants

A proposed ban on cigarette smoking at all Los Angeles restaurants was snuffed out Tuesday by the City Council, which instead decided to explore requiring the installation of partitions and ventilation systems to protect the health of nonsmoking diners.

The decision followed 90 minutes of sometimes heated debate among council members. It represented a rare defeat for crusading anti-smoking Councilman Marvin Braude, who had proposed making Los Angeles the first large city in the nation to prohibit smoking in all restaurants.

“My God, what more do you want?” a frustrated Braude said as it became clear his stacks of health studies on the dangers of so-called “secondhand smoke” had not been sufficiently persuasive.

When the smoke cleared after the debate, it seemed apparent that the city’s struggle with the issue was far from settled. The proposed ban, designed to complement earlier city laws Braude wrote to forbid smoking in elevators and grocery stores, fell two votes short of the eight needed for passage.

After deadlocking 6 to 6 on the ban, council members voted 8 to 4 to draft a compromise ordinance requiring partitions and vents to safeguard nonsmoking areas in restaurants that serve more than 50 patrons.

But the compromise, proposed by Councilman Hal Bernson, was in turn blasted by Braude as a “weak . . . seat-of-your-pants” proposal. The matter is expected to receive further review by council members in coming weeks.

Restaurant lobbyists hailed the defeat of Braude’s measure but also attacked the Bernson plan as a similar threat to the economic survival of many establishments.

“It’s not a great compromise if we’re going to put restaurants out of business,” said Rudy Cole, executive director of a coalition known as RSVP, Restaurants for a Sensible Voluntary Policy (On Smoking). The group, formed to fight the proposed ban, claims to represent 1,000 of the 8,500 or so restaurants in Los Angeles, including Spago, L’Ermitage, Musso & Frank Grill and other well-known eateries.

George Kieffer, an attorney for RSVP, said the ventilation requirement might cost individual restaurants “tens of thousands of dollars, maybe $100,000 or more, in expenses.”

The coalition plans to continue its heavy lobbying of the City Council to discourage members from enacting such a plan, he said.

“This one hasn’t been analyzed at all in terms of impact,” Kieffer said. “The impact would be huge. I would think that the vast majority of restaurants in the 50- to 100-(patron) range would have great difficulty paying for something like this.”

Braude, who wrote the city law that established nonsmoking sections in larger restaurants, argued for an all-out ban by citing new federal findings on the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke.

Nationwide studies indicate that 55,000 nonsmoking Americans die each year from exposure to such smoke, mostly from heart disease and lung cancer, Braude said. That does not count the untold numbers who merely become ill, he added.

“Why shouldn’t Los Angeles be a leader here?” the former two-pack-a-day smoker asked his colleagues. “This (ban) is inevitable. Let’s move forward and do it today.”

Supporting Braude were numerous public health organizations--including the American Heart Assn., the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Assn.--as well as several doctors and asthmatics sensitive to smoke.

“Mail from my constituents is running about 20 to 1 in favor of a ban,” said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who supported the ban. A doctor recently told him that if everyone in the country stopped smoking, 30% of all diseases would be eliminated, Yaroslavsky said.

“In the final analysis, health has to be put above everything else,” he said. “I’m sorry to say the status quo is not enough.”

Yaroslavsky voted for the ban along with Braude and council members Ernani Bernardi, Robert Farrell, Ruth Galanter and Joy Picus. Voting against it were Bernson, John Ferraro, Nate Holden, Gloria Molina, Joel Wachs and Michael Woo.

Bernson, who supported earlier anti-smoking measures, said he opposed the ban after seeing the failure of a similar ordinance in the much-smaller city of Beverly Hills. Restaurants there reported an abrupt decline in revenues after a smoking ban went into effect in early 1987.

It was repealed a few months later.

In Los Angeles, where many restaurants are now struggling because of the slowing economy, a ban would cause the loss of perhaps 3,300 jobs, according to a Laventhol & Horwath study commissioned by RSVP.

The study concluded that many smokers would react to a ban by eating at home or dining in other cities. Los Angeles would stand to lose about $1.5 million a year in sales tax revenues, the study said.

Councilman Holden, representing an inner-city district where it was said the ban might be particularly damaging, sided with restaurateurs who asked for limits on government interference in the commercial marketplace.

Holden chided his colleagues for supporting the ban while allowing wealthy donors to smoke at political fund-raising dinners.

Pointing to several council members whose dinners he had attended, Holden said: “They smoked in your face and you smiled and took the dough.”