No smoking; on second thought, nevermind

There were no smokers at Hemingway’s yesterday afternoon – no glowing cigarette lights lit… There were no smokers at Hemingway’s yesterday afternoon – no glowing cigarette lights lit up the shadowy room, no smoke hovered in the air and no ashtrays littered the bar table.

For a few hours, anyway.

At midnight on May 1, Allegheny County implemented a smoking ban for bars and restaurants, but by 3 p.m., an injunction issued by the Commonwealth Court prohibited county officials from enforcing it, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s website.

The smoking ban had originally taken effect on Jan. 2, 2007, restricting smoking in nearly all public areas or workplaces. But after two Downtown restaurants – Smithfield Cafe and Mitchell’s Restaurant and Bar – sued the county late last year, Common Pleas Judge Michael A. Della Vecchia issued an injunction to the bill that delayed the ban from affecting bars and restaurants until May 1.

This injunction ended at midnight, but the new injunction will stand until the court rules on the Downtown restaurants’ appeal, according to the Post-Gazette’s website.

Currently, the ban restricts smoking inside most public places and workplaces and also requires smokers to be at least five feet away from the facilities’ doorways. This restriction would also apply to most bars and restaurants; however, bars with fewer than 10 employees and where food accounts for less than 10 percent of its revenue would be exempt from this ban.

Yesterday marked the first day that Allegheny County had tried to implement its smoking ban and for the four law students who sat at the bar drinking Miller Lite and Sunset Ale at Hemingway’s, it marked the end of their final exams. But the topics of conversation at the bar included both the ban and final exams, with mixed feelings on each.

After their final exam had ended at noon, the four students headed over to Hemingway’s Cafe. By 1 p.m., they were debating the smoking ban, which was being upheld at that time.

In between sips of Sunset Ale, Adam Williams, a Pitt MBA and law student, sat at the bar and lectured his fellow classmates about why Allegheny County’s smoking ban is too restrictive of citizens’ rights.

“If you want to go to dinner in a non-smoking atmosphere, go to Panera or McDonald’s,” he said.

“Or Sharp Edge in Sewickley,” he added later, referring to a non-smoking bar that he said increased its sales by approximately 15 percent after it banned smoking in March.

Despite being a non-smoker, Williams was adamantly opposed to the ban. For him, the decision to ban smoking comes down to citizens’ rights.

It should be a personal choice to go to a smoking establishment or a non-smoking establishment, Williams said. It should not be up to the government to make the decision to ban smoking from a bar – it should be up to the bar’s owner.

“The market can regulate itself,” Williams said. “It always can and it always will.”

Seated next to him at the bar, Paul Kaufman, a law student at Pitt, shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

“I don’t think it will make any difference,” Kaufman said.

If smokers want to have a cigarette, they should take the initiative to go outside, Kaufman said. But in his opinion, bars should cater a little more to smokers, like designating special areas for them.

“I like to smoke in bars,” Kaufman said, “but I’ll just stop.”

To the left of him, fellow Pitt law students James Gabellio and Vaughn Spencer joked that Kaufman was just naturally apathetic and mostly debated with Williams about the ban.

Gabellio and Spencer, both non-smokers, mainly talked about the bill’s regulations and how businesses in other states were affected.

“You don’t make money on cigarettes in a bar,” said Gabellio, who doesn’t think bars’ customers will be deterred from going to bars just because of the smoking ban.

Spencer even thought the businesses’ revenue would increase.

“From my understanding,” Spencer said, “there is a little bit of a dip [in business] and it goes down, but then it goes up.”

Spencer’s understanding was echoed by Guillermo Cole, the public information official for the Allegheny County Health Department. He said that studies have shown businesses’ revenue has increased after the implementation of a smoking ban.

“There may be a drop-off initially,” Cole said, “but typically businesses recover and surpass business prior to the ban.”

While some people had voiced concerns that members of Allegheny County might opt to visit bars in neighboring counties without smoking bans, Cole said that the opposite would work as well – people in neighboring counties would come to Allegheny County for a smoke-free bar.

“They are there for other reasons,” Cole said. “They are there primarily to drink and eat, not to smoke.”

Cole said that most of the bigger states in the country, like New York, California and Florida, have already adopted smoking bans in large cities.

“We are certainly not on the leading edge of this,” Cole said.

As the four law students continued to debate the issue, Nicci Cooper, a bartender at Hemingway’s, got them a second round of beer.

“I really feel that it should be up to the owners,” she said, joining their conversation. “But I don’t feel that it will be that big of a deal. The people who will complain are the people who complain anyway.”