Court Rejects Bid to Hasten Workplace Smoking Rules

An anti-smoking group Tuesday lost a legal fight to force the federal government to quickly impose new occupational safety regulations on workplace exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke.

A federal appeals court ruled that although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has long missed self-imposed deadlines for the rules, the delay doesn’t violate federal law or government policy.

“The administration considers the . . . deadlines to be aspirational only,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit ruled.

Government shutdowns, budget cuts and other problems, including “huge and complex record [and] technological problems in assessing the levels of tobacco smoke in different settings” have all caused delays in the process, the court said.

The decision came in a suit by Action on Smoking and Health, a public interest group that asked the court to order OSHA to immediately issue the rules, which would ban smoking at about 6 million job sites, including restaurants and bars, and exempt only sites with enclosed smoking rooms.

“We’re disappointed, but we’re certainly looking for other ways to force OSHA to act on the issue,” said John H. Banzhaf, chief of the consumer group.

Joseph A. Dear, assistant labor secretary for occupational health and safety, said OSHA “will act when we have finished thoroughly reviewing the public record and have heard all sides of the issue.”

The Clinton administration’s own policy, the consumer group charged, said some sort of OSHA action should have taken place within 120 days of the close of public hearings in March 1995.

Debate about the rule, the administration said, provoked the biggest response in agency history--more than 335,000 pages of comments that must be considered, including thousands of documents from the tobacco industry, which is fighting the proposal.

“The administration has not been twiddling its thumbs,” the court said, noting that OSHA has issued contracts for data-processing services to process the mountains of material it received, and expects to complete that project within eight months.

The court also rejected the group’s complaint that OSHA is holding up consideration of tobacco rules so they can be included among a larger group of regulations about other types of indoor air pollutants.

“Rather than designating acceptable ventilation systems or other controls pollutant by pollutant, rule making by rule making, it makes sense to treat them together,” the court said.

Officials at OSHA and the consumer group could not be reached for comment.