Tobacco Country Does Slow Burn Over Scott’s Smoke-Free Plant : Workplace: Kentucky offered the paper giant $20 million in incentives to build. Now workers can’t light up anywhere on the company’s property.

Kentucky officials offered at least $20 million in incentives to lure Scott Paper Co. and its new multimillion-dollar industrial plant to the state. They dangled new roads, employee training, grants and loans before company officials.

Scott accepted eagerly, building its high-tech paper plant amid the soybean, corn and tobacco fields of western Kentucky. The company hired 230 workers, paying them high salaries. It even piped its waste water miles away to bypass the nearby Green River because of environmental concerns.

Then Scott committed the ultimate sacrilege in Kentucky: It banned smoking, not just inside its buildings but anywhere on the two-square-mile property.

In the midst of tobacco country, the company has established one of the toughest no-smoking policies in the nation. Any infraction will result in immediate dismissal.

If Scott employees want to light up on their lunch hour, they must walk to the parking lot, then follow the sapling-lined driveway out to U.S. 60 and park on the shoulder. Or they can drive to a local diner.

“If you’re a smoker--and we have people who smoke--they leave the plant for their lunch break and drive at least a mile and a half off the property,” plant manager Mike Lerch said. “We work 12-hour shifts, so basically, you abstain for 12 hours.”

The irony is hard to miss. Daviess County, where the plant is located, has more than 800 tobacco farmers who last year produced 6.8 million pounds of tobacco, the state’s Agriculture Department says. At an average price of $1.83 per pound, the tobacco raised there was worth nearly $12.5 million.

About $20 million more in tobacco from surrounding counties was sold at auctions in Owensboro.

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Scott’s plant, which opened this year, covers about 1,200 acres. About 800 acres are leased to farmers. They once grew tobacco on the property but now are allowed only soybeans, corn and winter wheat.

The president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative--the group representing farmers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri--lives within three miles of the Scott plant. And he is fuming over Scott’s policy.

“Tobacco allows probably half our agricultural community to remain on the farm. It pays our mortgages, buys our vehicles and puts our kids through school,” Rod Kuegel said. “I don’t want to see anybody’s rights crushed. That’s what they’ve done. If a person is a smoker and works at Scott, they’re walking all over them.”

Kuegel said he’s particularly upset about the incentives the state offered Scott in 1990. In Kentucky, tobacco taxes help significantly to pay for state government and fund the types of incentives awarded to the paper company.

“There ought to be some legislation, make them give back their state funding,” Kuegel said. “It’s just another effort to take a politically correct position. How would it hurt for an employee to go outside and smoke a cigarette?”

But Scott officials say their policy at the plant, which isn’t a companywide rule, is merely an extension of no-smoking rules already enforced inside the nation’s hospitals, shopping malls and federal buildings.

“It’s inconvenient to be a smoker and work in a lot of places,” company spokesman Rob Prague said in Pittsburgh. “I don’t think Scott is any different than a number of companies.”

It’s difficult to say how many companies enforce such tough no-smoking rules, although even public health advocates say Scott’s policy is rare.

In a recent survey of large Kentucky manufacturers by the American Cancer Society, 16 reported bans on cigarette smoking both indoors and outdoors. It said 111 companies reported allowing smoking only outdoors, and 141 allowed it in designated areas indoors. But an overwhelming majority of the companies surveyed--82%--didn’t respond to the poll.

Scott’s tough smoking policy is surprising to health advocates as well:

“There are a lot of corporations that have instituted programs to get their employees to stop smoking,” said Ruth Casloff of the American Lung Assn. in New York. But she added: “In today’s world, nine out of 10 have a smoking area.”

“I’ve never heard of anybody having a policy like that,” agreed Joann Schellenbach, spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society in New York. “Mostly, I think, they’re limiting smoking to restricted areas, but more and more companies are going smoke-free.”

Charlie Finch of the Raleigh, N.C.-based Tobacco Growers Information Committee, said most companies usually tell workers to step outside to light up.

“What we would like to see in companies that don’t want to go to the expense of having a large smoking area is to be fair so that workers have the choice of going outside,” he said. “But two miles out the front gate? I think that is a little ridiculous.”