Judge Revives Challenge to L.A. Smoking Ban

In a potential blow to Los Angeles’ fledging restaurant smoking ban, a Superior Court judge Thursday unexpectedly revived a tobacco industry-sponsored effort to put the embattled ordinance on the ballot. The decision could lead to an election as early as November on whether the city should continue prohibiting smoking in its 7,000 eateries.

Judge Robert H. O’Brien struck down a city election law that had invalidated hundreds of signatures collected last month by opponents of the smoking ban and had waylaid their drive to force an election.

Although O’Brien’s ruling allows the ban to remain in effect, its opponents expressed confidence that the ruling gives them enough valid signatures to put the hotly contested issue before voters.

O’Brien ruled that the city requirement for signature-gatherers to be registered city voters imposed an unfair, undemocratic burden on those trying to qualify ballot measures. A coalition of restaurateurs had collected nearly 100,000 signatures to put the smoking ban to a vote, but the city earlier this month declared the petition drive a failure. It cited a sampling of signatures that found flaws, including the fact that many petition-circulators were not registered to vote.

O’Brien ordered the city clerk to check the signatures in dispute to determine if they are valid and return to court Thursday. City elections chief Kristin Heffron went to work calling in additional staff to begin the count Monday.

The ruling was the latest salvo in a protracted war over the controversial law that made Los Angeles the largest city in the United States to ban smoking in restaurants.

“We know we have a sufficient number of signatures,” said Dana Reed, attorney for the Los Angeles Hospitality Coalition, a group of restaurant and hotel owners who brought the court challenge.

Coalition members, some of them nonsmokers, have argued that the law unfairly limits personal freedom and harms business by driving smokers out of restaurants.

City lawyers said they will appeal the ruling. Other anti-smoking advocates responded with outrage.

“That the judge would say to the people of Los Angeles: ‘You can’t make the rules, you have to allow tobacco companies to influence an election and allow people from out of the state to come in with a crew and collect signatures’--it flies in the face of the democratic system,” said Councilman Marvin Braude, a reformed smoker who campaigned 15 years for the ban before seeing it pass June 2.

The smoking ban applies to all enclosed restaurants but not bars. Patrons also are permitted to smoke in outdoor patios.

The court challenge was launched by the hospitality coalition--a group of restaurant and hotel owners heavily bankrolled by the tobacco industry--after the city clerk declared that the group had failed to collect the 58,275 signatures required to put the ban to a vote.

The coalition submitted 97,572 signatures. But in taking a 5% sampling of the signatures--standard procedure for qualifying ballot measures under the City Charter--the clerk found that nearly a quarter of the sample’s signatures had been gathered by petition-circulators who were not registered voters in the city. As a result, those signatures were automatically invalidated and not checked.

Under O’Brien’s ruling, the city clerk must now check the validity of those signatures as part of the sample. If most are found to be valid, the city clerk will check the balance of all petition signatures, and the referendum will have a chance to qualify for the ballot.

Attorneys for the coalition argued that the city’s decades-old requirement for signature-gatherers to be Los Angeles registered voters posed an undue burden because the petition sponsors were required to gather signatures within 30 days. They also questioned whether the requirement was reasonable when it applied to city referendums, such as the effort to repeal the smoking ban, but not to other types of ballot measures, such as charter amendments or initiatives.

City lawyers countered that the requirement prevented fraud by giving election officials a way to verify the signatures of circulators.

But O’Brien ruled that the city requirement for signature-gatherers imposed an unfair “burden on the democratic process.”

Braude challenged the credibility of the coalition members who brought the court challenge. The group initially claimed to be a grass-roots organization until campaign disclosure records showed that tobacco companies contributed $211,355 of the nearly $216,000 spent by the coalition.