Columnist Susan Snyder: Politicians using smoke and mirrors

Friday, April 13, 2001 | 9:13 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

I am a dolt.

From this day forward, each time I call Clark County's Regional Transportation Commission the Regional "Transit" Commission -- as I did in Tuesday's Valley Views -- I will personally pay RTC General Manager Jacob Snow $1.

A thousand apologies. Now on to a more breathy topic.

A couple of Nevada lawmakers want to ban smoking from large grocery stores or require stores to provide separate rooms for smokers.

Actually, more than a couple of legislators probably would support it. But we probably will never know how many because the bill likely will die in committee Monday.

The Assembly and Senate versions of the bill have had hearings before the Assembly Judiciary Committee. But committee Chairman Bernie Anderson, D-Sparks, never called for a vote.

And he's not going to, according to an e-mail he sent to Stephanie Glantz, a 9-year-old Reno girl who suffers from asthma. She has been pushing for such a measure since the 1999 session. She was 7.

"I do not see the bill leaving the committee since we gave stores a chance to remodel in the last session and to change our mind at the next session hardly seems fair. I guess that means unless there are eight members of the committee who come and tell me they want the bill just the way it is, it will not pass by April 16th," says Anderson's April 2 electronic missive to Glantz.

Gee, let's not soften our tone in replying to a 9-year-old, 'K Assemblyman?

Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, R-Reno and the bill's sponsor, says the "chance to remodel" was a 1999 measure in which large stores have until 2010 to add an open alcove or arrange slot machines into a makeshift wall. (I guess that blocks all the smoke that's too lazy to float over it.)

Smokers already feel discriminated against. They have become pariahs of society, which is unfair and unkind. Smoking is a personal choice and an addiction.

However ...

Tobacco smoke kills people. Therefore it is far more unfair and unkind to force people to breathe it simply because they ran out of milk.

Nevadans are spending tobacco settlement money on everything from prescription drug subsidies for seniors to scholarships for teenagers. It's our way of taking something we know is negative and making it a positive.

But we're still going to make you breathe the stuff when you hit the store for a gallon of ice cream.

"It's the height of hypocrisy," says Angle, who sits on the committee that's choking her bill. "This is incredibly inconsistent with the tobacco settlement. It is embarrassing that we will not do this little thing."

Embarrassing because Nevada has the nation's highest smoking rate -- about 30 percent of us light up.

So while other kids are doing book reports, Glantz is testifying in legislative hearings. She has severe asthma, and trip through a store's smoky entrance means a trip to the hospital.

"I know this smoke is bad for all children, not just me," Glantz wrote in a March letter. "I don't want to have to breathe what I fear. If this bill does not pass ... it shows that Nevada really doesn't care about kids like me."

A child is leading us. But our lawmakers can't see her through the haze.