Friday, Dec. 10, 2004 | 5:27 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
December 11 - 12, 2004
If Bob Bedore is to believed, the Emerald Island Casino in Henderson is an oasis among a desert of cigarette smoke.
The Emerald Island Casino is one of a handful of casinos in the Las Vegas Valley that has a "nonsmoking section," and is believed to be the only casino in the valley that has a fully enclosed section where gamblers play slot machines without inhaling second-hand smoke.
It even features a separate entrance so customers who don't want to come into contact with smoke can enter and leave without walking through the casino's main gaming floor, where smoking is allowed.
"It's nice to go to a casino where you're not allowed to smoke," Bedore, 65, said while sitting at a slot machine in the casino's small smoke-free section. "I can go to other casinos too, the ones where you can smoke. But I like coming here the most."
A casino without smoke seems out of place in Las Vegas, where gambling, drinking and smoking go hand in hand.
And that would not change even if two petitions that seek to ban smoking in public places succeed in passing because neither petition will bar smoking in gaming areas of a casino.
The two competing anti-smoking petitions filed in November, which will go before the Legislature in February if certified by Secretary of State Dean Heller, move to prohibit smoking in public places.
Although both would allow smoking on the gaming floor, one would prohibit smoking in other parts of a casino such as restaurants and malls. The other, supported by the casino industry, would allow smoking in all areas of a casino.
While previous proposals have failed to get widespread support, the petitions are opening up a debate in Nevada between the growing numbers of people who don't smoke and those who are afraid that banning smoking would hurt tourism.
The petition supported by the casino industry is known as Responsibly Protect Nevadans from Second-Hand Smoke. The other petition, supported by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association, is being pushed by the Nevada Tobacco Prevention Coalition and would limit smoking to the casino floors.
Under the Nevada Tobacco Prevention Coalition's proposal, called the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act, smoking would be banned from casino restaurants, lobbies and banquet areas -- essentially anywhere minors are allowed. The petition also seeks to ban smoking from all grocery stores and convenience stores.
"We're trying to protect some people but not all," said Kendall Stagg, policy director for the Nevada Tobacco Prevention Coalition. "I have to say to the people working in the casino industry that the primary focus of our petition is children."
If the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act is passed, then employees working for a casino on the gaming floor could request to be transferred to another section of the casino that is smoke-free, Stagg said.
Responsibly Protect Nevadans from Second-Hand Smoke's proposal avoids the casino issue altogether. Smoking would be permitted in all areas of a casino, including restaurants and lobbies, said Lee Haney, of Rogich Communications and the representative for Responsibly Protect Nevadans from Second-Hand Smoke.
The petition's primary support comes from restricted gaming locations such as convenience stores and bars, which contend that the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act would ban smoking in areas of those venues where slot machines are clustered. The petition also has gained the support of the Nevada Resort Association, which represents major casinos.
Association President Bill Bible said the Responsibly Protect Nevadans petition essentially leaves the decision to prohibit smoking in a casino up to management. The Clean Indoor Air Act, however, could curtail smoking through much of a resort.
"That would have an extremely detrimental effect on our ability to do business and compete with other venues" such as Indian casinos and casinos in foreign countries that allow smoking, Bible said.
The reason for not restricting smoking in casinos is purely economic, Haney said. Since so much of the economy in Las Vegas and Nevada is based on tourism dollars, and many tourists who come to Las Vegas smoke, Responsibly Protect Nevadans from Second-Hand Smoke thought it best not to ban smoking in casinos.
"Our focus is to try to protect people from the effects of second-hand smoke, but we have a responsible approach," Haney said. "Because our economy is so based on the casino industry, we decided to not to include" casinos.
The backers of that petition sought not to include other venues where gambling is permitted, such as convenience stores, grocery stores and bars.
The petitions come amid a wave of local and statewide smoking bans in public areas nationwide and growing concern among casinos -- places where customers are encouraged to indulge -- that smoking will eventually be outlawed.
The secretary of state's office is waiting on a legal opinion before certifying the petitions.
To qualify a petition needs the signatures of at least 10 percent of the number of people who voted in the last general election.
The groups, which started gathering weeks before the general election, used the 2002 general election as its benchmark.
The petitions were due Nov. 9, a week after the Nov. 2 general election, calling the standard into question.
If 2002 is the standard, the petitions will qualify. If 2004 is the standard, they will fail.
Smoking issues have become a major topic of discussion for the American Gaming Association, the chief trade group for commercial casinos. Members are expected to vote next year on whether to establish a committee that will determine indoor air quality requirements for casinos. The group is already working toward publishing a set of industry best practices.
The question that has yet to be answered is how much the Las Vegas economy would suffer if smoking is banned in casinos.
Casinos and gaming lobbyists say they aren't aware of any significant studies that have examined the potential effect of a smoking ban on tourism. But they point to a couple of Nevada casinos that went belly up after going nonsmoking. Others say one of those casinos, the Silver City on the Strip, was on the way out well before it went smokeless and closed a few years ago.
Australia, where gambling in widely available, is moving toward more extensive bans on smoking in bars and gaming areas in Victoria and New South Wales, the country's largest states.
In September 2002, after a smoking ban was put in place in some gaming areas of Victoria, profits fell at the country's largest gaming company. Tabcorp Ltd. reported a 3 percent decline in profit, before taxes, for the year ended June 30, 2003, compared with the previous year. Gaming revenue fell 8 percent during that period.
But the company, which since purchased a competitor, reported a 23 percent increase in profit for the year ended June 30, the most recent data available. Gaming revenue rose 1 percent from a year ago.
In November 2002, Delaware enacted a statewide ban on smoking in almost all public places, including restaurants, bars and inside racinos. When the ban went into effect there were widespread fears that the prohibition on smoking would ultimately lead to the closing of businesses and would take a large portion of the profit from the gaming industry.
"We had an immediate downturn in the number of customers coming to casinos out here," said Robert Byrd, a lobbyist for Wood Byrd & Associates, Inc., who represents Dover Downs Gaming and Entertainment Inc. in Delaware. "The income coming into casinos dropped about 20 percent immediately after the smoking ban."
Byrd estimates that the gaming industry in Delaware contributed about $195 million annually to state revenue before the ban. In the first few months of the ban, Byrd said the gaming industry lost millions in profits. However, he said that gamblers have returned to the casinos in the two years since the ban took effect and currently the profits are coming in at the same rate as before the ban.
Less than a year after the ban, the state in 2003 allowed racetrack casinos in Delaware to add up to 500 additional slot machines to help offset the decline. Casinos also were allowed to extend their hours of operation and offer larger slot jackpots and extend credit to gamblers.
Tom Cook, the chief of policy and operations at the Delaware Department of Finance, confirmed that the state's revenue from gaming dropped after the smoking ban went into place, from $193 million in fiscal year 2002 to $180.8 million in fiscal year 2003. The state projects that it will take in $198.5 million for 2005.
Stagg said another reason for the drop in Delaware's gaming revenues was the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which took place around the time Delaware enacted the smoking ban.
Byrd said that in Las Vegas, which is clearly more dependent on the gaming industry and the tourist dollars it generates than Delaware, a smoking ban could have much more dire consequences.
"I think there will be a significant number of people who smoke and who will go elsewhere," Byrd said. "They will find they can go to the Caribbean to gamble and smoke."
Some casinos on the Strip offer smoke-free banks of slots or smokeless tables to accommodate nonsmokers but acknowledge that nonsmoking areas are less profitable. Most modern casinos such as Bellagio and even newer bars and pubs have expensive air filtration systems that suck up smoke and filter in purified air.
MGM Mirage, like many competitors, has chosen to spend millions on filtration systems rather than prohibit smoking or enclose smoking areas. The company's systems maintain air quality that's "well above existing federal standards," company spokesman Alan Feldman said.
"At the end of the day our business is served by protecting the needs of our guests," both smokers and nonsmokers, Feldman said.
"Simply imposing one or the other on people seems unfair to the other side," he said.
Some anti-smoking advocates say the filters don't do enough to remove carcinogens and aren't as effective as closed-off smoking areas.
But the anti-smoking lobby isn't powerful in Nevada, where the Legislature has voted down numerous smoke-free initiatives over the years.
The question, says James Repace, a health physicist and second-hand smoke expert who also holds an appointment as a visiting assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, is the safety of workers.
According to the abstract of a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in September, the air in casinos has upwards of 50 percent more carcinogens than "major truck highways and polluted city streets." In Las Vegas, where an estimated 168,500 people work in the casino industry, this could translate to serious health problems for casino workers.
"Casinos try to balance a real or imagined loss of profit with the health of the workers," Repace said. "What it means is that the health of the profits is more important than the health of the workers."
He said that while casinos may see a temporary loss of profits when a smoking ban is put into place, they will ultimately gain nonsmoking customers who avoided the casino or bar or restaurant because it was previously a smoking establishment.
Second-hand smoke is a serious concern among those in the medical profession. Nonsmokers who live with smokers face a 24 percent increased risk of lung cancer, according to a 1997 study published by A.K. Hackshaw, St. Bartholomew's and Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Workers at casinos, however, don't seem so concerned with either second-hand smoke or working in a casino that bans smoking.
"I tell you, I have to worry about first-hand smoke," said Mary Ann Sasinowski, a slot ambassador at the Green Valley Ranch Station Casino. Sasinowski, like other casino workers interviewed, is a smoker and has no problems with second-hand smoke at the casino.
Sasinowski attributes her tolerance of second-hand smoke at the casino less to her personal smoking habit than to the ventilation system at the casino, which she attests is very good. Plus, she said people come to Las Vegas to gamble. And many gamblers smoke.
"You can't tell a gambler not to smoke, and you can't tell a gambler not to drink," she said.
And because Las Vegas does attract customers who smoke, she said she wouldn't support any law or act that would put off people from coming to Las Vegas.
"Sometimes, I get a customer who doesn't like sitting next to a smoker at a slot machine and they make a complaint," Sasinowski said. "But what do you expect? It's Las Vegas."
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