LA City Council Mulls More Smoking Restrictions
It’s being reported all over the place this morning that the City Council is considering a proposal by the Tom LaBonge-headed Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee to ban smoking on restaurant patios or within 10 feet of any outdoor establishment that serves food or beverages. Fortunately for you club goers, age-restricted venues such as bars and cigar bars would be exempt. Surprisingly to me, much of the anxiety over the proposal seems to revolve around who’s going to be responsible for enforcing the curb rather than whether customers have the right to smoke outside. Regardless, the easy money is on the proposal making it through the City Council easily given the success of similar measures nationwide, including in local municipalities like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Calabasas.
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OK, this may be a stupid question, but if smoking is banned in bars and restaurants in the state how can the city override this with exemptions. Cigar Bars are private clubs and that is how they get around it. Did I miss something as its been years since I’ve been in a club or bar where smoking was allowed inside.
Good point on who will enforce and how it will be paid for is the biggy. It will wind up being like the ridiculous cell phone and texting ban, largely unenforced.
On a side bar I think the whole banning outside is pretty annoying and stupid. I quit 8 years ago and still thing smokers should be able to at least light up outside. I run into it often even in the cities were it was supposedly banned and just shrug my shoulders and move where I don’t have their smoke rolling around me.
I don’t think anybody’s proposing any new exemptions to the existing state law that bans smoking inside. Did I miss that somewhere?
Good riddance to smokers on the patios, I say. They can kill themselves elsewhere.
New York City (and state) banned smoking on outdoor patios of restaurants and bars as part of the overall smoking ban years ago. It was a shock to me when I moved to LA to find that the same thing didn’t happen here. That I had to endure smokers in the outdoor sections of restaurants was a drag for me because that’s often the preferable section of an establishment.
I look forward to sitting outside Intelligentsia, sipping my $12 coffee and inhaling the noxious Sunset Junction car, truck and bus exhaust, untainted by secondhand tobacco smoke.
You said "Fortunately for you club goers, age-restricted venues such as bars and cigar bars would be exempt"…isn’t that a give back? Maybe I’ve misread.
The proposal is specifically concerned with smoking "on restaurant patios or within 10 feet of any outdoor establishment that serves food or beverages," so bars and cigar bars would be exempt from those regulations. Doesn’t have anything to do with existing state regulations relating to smoking inside.
What are the smoking laws in Northrend?