Council Weighs Restaurant Smoking Ban : Business: Issue splits officials between advocates and those who fear an adverse economic impact on food establishments.

Responding to a growing concern in Southern California about the effects of smoking on nonsmokers, the City Council is preparing to consider a sweeping ordinance to ban smoking in virtually all enclosed public spaces, including workplaces and restaurants.

Passions for and against the measure, being drafted by the city’s Health Department, are already building.

“It’s not so much a health issue,” Mayor Jess Hughston, the main proponent of the law, said Tuesday. “I have a right to breathe clean air.”

Other City Council members, who expect to consider the new law in March, have expressed concern about the economic impacts of a smoking ban on restaurants in the midst of a recession.

“I hate smoking with a passion,” said City Councilman Chris Holden, “but a 100% ban puts an undue restriction on restaurants and small businesses when most of them are going under.”

At its meeting Tuesday, the council voted temporarily to withhold a letter of support for a similar proposed restriction in Los Angeles after some council members objected that Pasadena restaurateurs had not been consulted.

“It would be extraordinarily hypocritical to write the letter unless we were doing the same thing (banning smoking) ourselves,” said Councilman William Thomson.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to put off consideration of its own smoking ban for five weeks, while the city’s chief legislative analyst and chief administrative officer study the potential job losses and reduced sales resulting from a ban.

The proposed Los Angeles measure, authored by Councilman Marvin Braude, has met heavy opposition from the tobacco industry, restaurant workers and the 3,000-member California Restaurant Assn., whose representatives have said the ban would drive patrons to neighboring cities.

Restaurateurs in Pasadena expressed similar concerns about a 100% ban on smoking in their businesses. “People wouldn’t come to Pasadena,” said Nick Rasic, co-owner of Dodsworth Bar and Grill. “They’d go to Glendale, Eagle Rock, Arcadia. I’m not for it, I can tell you that.”

Rasic also expressed concern about the timing of the measure. “Right now, it’s tough, it’s tight; people are watching their dollars,” he said.

The California Restaurant Assn. said recently that the average profit for restaurants in the state is only about 3%.

Gregg Smith, who is partners with his brother Bob in the Parkway Grill and the Crocodile Cafe, said restaurants should regulate themselves.

“This is the United States of America, and that’s the way it should be handled,” Smith said. “There is far too much government intervention already. The businesses that listen to their customers are the businesses that are going to thrive.”

He said that in his restaurants, despite a current city requirement that only 25% of the seating be segregated for nonsmokers, the owners have designated between 80% and 90% of the seating for that purpose.

“We regulate ourselves,” he said.

Smith said that a 100% city ban might hurt his business. “But a 100% ban in California wouldn’t hurt us,” he said. “Why not make it statewide?”

Vice Mayor Rick Cole agreed that a unilateral ban in Pasadena, without similar bans in neighboring cities, would be onerous for local restaurants. “Everybody does it or nobody does it,” he said.

He cited the example of Beverly Hills, whose City Council quickly reversed its 100% ban five years ago. Local restaurants reportedly lost up to 30% of their trade after the briefly imposed measure.

Hughston said he was seeking to communicate with other mayors in the county to encourage collective action against smoking. He is a member of the Pasadena Tobacco Control Assn., an alliance of citizens who support a smoking ban. The group seeks to serve as a liaison with other cities.

“They’re trying to coordinate things so that all the cities in the area pass similar ordinances at the same time,” said Deborah Sherwood, tobacco control coordinator for the city’s Health Department.

Fourteen California cities and two counties have barred smoking in restaurants since 1990.

Hughston added that the economic effects of a nonsmoking policy in restaurants had been exaggerated, citing the case of California Pizza Kitchens, which imposed its own smoking ban last summer. The chain has 24 restaurants nationwide, 13 in California, including one that recently opened in Pasadena.

“It hasn’t hurt their business,” Hughston said.

A spokeswoman for the chain said Wednesday that business was up since last summer in the 19 restaurants that were operating at the time the ban was imposed. “We’ve also received a lot of praise from our employees, who were the main reason we started the policy,” the spokeswoman said.

Smith, the Parkway Grill owner, said he doubted that a ban would prompt a large-scale defection of Pasadena diners to other cities.

“It wouldn’t be as bad as Beverly Hills or Los Angeles,” he said. “Right across the street from L.A. is Santa Monica,” where customers can eat in good restaurants and smoke.

Pasadena’s flourishing restaurant business, with new establishments opening monthly in the Old Town area, has no such problem, Smith said. “Pasadena is where the quality restaurants are,” he said. “I’m not sure people are going to go to Arcadia or Eagle Rock if the quality is not there.”

Michael Hawkins, a partner in the Green Street Restaurant, disagreed.

“Our customers have the option of not eating in Pasadena,” Hawkins said. “They also don’t have to go out, period. They can go to the grocery store, buy food and take it home and eat it.”

Sherwood said she has been meeting with officials of the Tri-City Restaurant Assn., which represents restaurant owners in Pasadena, Glendale and Burbank, to prepare the way for the proposed anti-smoking legislation.

There is opposition from the association, she conceded. But several restaurant owners who have imposed their own smoking bans, will support the effort, she said.

Councilman Isaac Richard, the council’s only smoker, suggested that the city take advantage of Los Angeles’ quandary to increase business in Pasadena’s restaurants and raise sales tax revenues for the city.

Smokers tend to spend more in restaurants, said Richard, who describes himself as an “anti-smoking smoker,” because of his support for a successful cigarette tax initiative in 1988.

A smoking ban in Los Angeles could “steer some of those (free-spending) smokers our way,” he said.

“Smokers eat more, drink more and, consequently, tip more,” Richard said.

“Yeah, but they die sooner,” Cole said.