2 Cities Team Up on Smoking Bans : Health: Los Angeles and Santa Monica take steps toward a regional ban on restaurant smoking. The plan would blunt a key opposition argument: that smokers would take their business to another city.

Los Angeles and Santa Monica city officials are cooperating in an unusual regional effort to ban smoking in restaurants by attempting to coordinate the passage of parallel anti-smoking laws .

Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude suggested the idea as a way to neutralize restaurant owners’ most effective argument against anti-smoking laws: that smokers will take their restaurant business to another city.

“If all of the cities of the region go together, they’ll have nowhere else to go,” said Glenn Barr, press secretary to Braude.

On Tuesday, the Santa Monica City Council asked the city attorney’s staff to draw up a law to be considered in concert with the Los Angeles proposal. Santa Monica Mayor Judy Abdo said efforts were under way to sign up three other Westside cities, Beverly Hills, Culver City and West Hollywood, although all are to some degree more hesitant than Santa Monica.

Braude, author since 1975 of all Los Angeles laws limiting smoking, enlisted the support of the Westside cities a few months ago.

The veteran councilman introduced an outright ban on restaurant smoking in Los Angeles last month--for the second time in a year. On the last go-round the vote was 6-6, but that was before the election that put three new council members into office. The three have indicated preliminary support for his measure.

The California Restaurant Assn. has taken the position that smoking should be banned in all public places, not just restaurants. Legislation to that effect was stalled in the state Legislature last session and will be reconsidered in January.

“It’s not a happy subject for restaurant folks,” said association spokeswoman Jo-Linda Thompson. “We want to be treated like everyone else,”

Santa Monica restaurateurs are prepared to give the City Council an earful if it goes forward with an all-out ban on restaurant smoking, said Jeff King, co-owner of two upscale eateries, Ocean Avenue Seafood and I Cugini. “If it’s a ban in all buildings of any kind, fine, but if it just discriminates against restaurants, it’s unfair.”

One thing all the cities agree on: Cooperation with Los Angeles is essential to protect the restaurants’ economic viability in an already jittery economy.

“If Los Angeles won’t do it, no one will,” Abdo said.

Braude promises to deliver when his proposed Los Angeles law goes before the City Council, probably in January. “It will be done,” he said.

He dismissed an argument for a statewide ban as a ploy by the tobacco industry to thwart the nonsmoking movement. The tobacco lobby could defeat such a measure, he said, because it has clout in Sacramento that it lacks in local jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, other Westside cities are pondering whether to join the bandwagon or to demur.

Beverly Hills in 1987 briefly banned restaurant smoking, making it the first American city to do so. But it soon capitulated amid a firestorm of criticism and a loss of revenue to the city’s eateries.

“Our position is to track what’s going on in Los Angeles,” said Beverly Hills Mayor Vicki Reynolds. “Our ordinance is working now, and my greatest concern is that we don’t have any adverse effects on our restaurants.”

The current Beverly Hills ordinance exempts bar areas and requires that 60% of the remainder of the room be nonsmoking.

Like Reynolds, West Hollywood Mayor Paul Koretz is wary of a ban’s impact on the business community, but he said he favored a regional solution to the smoking issue.

In Culver City, however, it appears there’s a rougher row to hoe. When Councilwoman Jozelle Smith brought up the regional effort to ban smoking in restaurants at Monday night’s council meeting, she couldn’t even get it scheduled as a discussion item for a future meeting.

Councilman Mike Balkman thinks the policy in place--toughened last year to ban smoking in restaurants with fewer than 25 seats--is restrictive enough without abridging anyone’s rights.

“I don’t think it’s (the Westside smoking ban) going to go over in Culver City. We all feel that we have a good, solid policy. The feeling that I got from the council was that there was little interest in it.”

Times staff writers Mathis Chazanov, Bernice Hirabayashi and Duke Helfand contributed to this story.