Oxnard Council Will Consider Tightening Smoking Ordinance : Health: Officials agree to review portions of the law, considered by many to be one of the most lenient in the county.

On the day when Ventura’s strict new smoking law went into effect, elected officials in Oxnard reluctantly decided to take a closer look at banning smoking in restaurants and workplaces.

The council also will consider exempting small businesses from its ordinance when the city staff returns later this year with options for tightening the city’s existing law.

The unanimous decision to review portions of the law came after two hours of discussion from health officials about the dangers of secondhand smoke and debate among council members regarding government interference in the private sector.

Council members Michael A. Plisky and Bedford Pinkard clearly opposed tampering at all with the law, which is considered by many to be one of the most lenient smoking ordinances in Ventura County.

But Mayor Manuel M. Lopez and Councilman Thomas E. Holden both said that recent evidence linking secondhand smoke to heart and lung disease and other ailments warranted another look. Councilman Andres Herrera was absent.

“There’s no question in my mind that smoking is unhealthy,” said Holden, a former smoker. “The problem with cigarette smoke is it affects people other than myself.”

The current law allows smoking in restaurants--unlike ordinances adopted within the past eight months by Ventura County and the cities of Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Moorpark, Camarillo and Ojai.

The Oxnard ordinance, written six years ago, also lets employers decide whether to allow smoking in their offices or workplaces. None of the other recently tightened ordinances allow smoking in the workplace.

But Pinkard and Plisky both said that businesses are already overly encumbered by government regulation, be it local, state or federal.

“It’s up to parents--not government--to take care of the children,” Plisky said.

He also said he would rather see the resources that would be spent on stricter smoking regulations used instead to curb “dope fiends” and “welfare freaks who have babies just to get (public) money.”

Pinkard said: “It’s not my fear that I’m going to die from secondhand smoke. It’s my fear that I’ll die from some drunken driver.”

Although the council voted to restudy only certain portions of the law, a dozen or more speakers urged the council to adopt regulations at least as strict as the other five cities and Ventura County.

“It’s a public health problem,” said James Orlowski, an allergist who is co-chairman of the Smoking Action Coalition of Oxnard. “When you’re smoking around other people, it basically isn’t fair.

“I’m seeing patients who are getting sick because of the smoke of others,” Orlowski said. “It’s hard to understand how this is still going on in this day and age.”

Nan Waltman, an educator for Ventura County Public Health, said it is the council’s duty to protect the residents of Oxnard from tobacco smoke.

“It’s in the highest category of cancer-causing agents--like radon and asbestos,” she said. “There is no safe place for it in the workplace.”

But Plisky discounted evidence presented by smoking-ban advocates that suggests exposure to secondhand smoke can be dangerous.

“The evidence is not conclusive and I will be hard-pressed to go along with their demands,” Plisky said in an interview prior to Tuesday’s council meeting.

“Most of this stuff comes about because we’ve got too many dime-a-dozen Ph.D.s who have to justify their grants,” he said. “As long as (Oxnard employers) have a choice, I think (the council) has done a sufficient job.”

A survey by Ventura County Public Health conducted in 1992 concluded that only 8% of diners request seats in a smoking section of a restaurant.

Furthermore, the survey found, only 4% of restaurateurs reported a drop in business due to smoking restrictions.

Even so, the president of the Oxnard Chamber of Commerce said before the council meeting that Oxnard merchants are opposed to regulating smoking in public places.

“I don’t think we have the right to tell a business owner what he can do to run his business,” said Pat Plew, owner of the Kwik Kopy printing shop. “There are myriads of other places you can go to eat that are nonsmoking. It’s time we started to get the government off our back--at all levels.”

Manny Vega, the community services official who will prepare the options for revising the law, said that despite receiving an average of one complaint a day about violations to the current smoking law, no citations have ever been issued.

“We have given quite a few warnings,” he told the council.