Gambling Casinos becoming smoke-free: not really

 Two great legislative lobbies -- and they deserve each other, cynics might say -- have clashed in New Jersey.

One is the anti-smoking lobby. The other, that champion of personal freedom, the "gaming" industry. It's all about prohibiting smoking in workplaces.

The cigarette is a marvel. Still strangely profitable, it has been in retreat on all public battlefields for decades now. But the enemy keeps closing in.

Soon in New Jersey -- as already in California, New York and a half-dozen other states -- the burning of tobacco indoors seems doomed in factories, stores, offices, warehouses, hospitals and wherever people gather to earn a living.

But gambling casinos are indoor workplaces, too. Immense places. Just 12 of them employ a total 50,000 workers -- all in one New Jersey location, Atlantic City.

And what taxpayers! This year they will collect $4.8 billion in gambling revenues and pay $350 million of this over to the state in taxes -- some 2 percent of New Jersey's spending.

Members of NJGASP -- the New Jersey Group Against Smoke Pollution -- and allied activists contribute to government, too, but the squeeze on them is diffuse. It is not so sharp a line in the budget.

Therefore, to take all the suspense out of this, smoking is about to be forbidden in all indoor workplaces of New Jersey -- except 12.

This is alleged to be a compromise.

The banning brigade originally wanted total prohibition. But Atlantic City legislators argued that for customers to have to refrain during the tense recreations of losing their money would hurt "the industry." Customers would stay away or reduce their play if they had to keep going out on the Boardwalk for a drag.

And the real killer -- tax revenues would fall.

The state Treasury in Trenton would lose $93 million in tax take, and 3,400 jobs would dry up. These alarming projections came from a PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by the State Casino Association.

Now, acting Gov. Richard Codey wants a smoking ban in place before his term ends in January, and if letting the casinos off the hook is the price to get it, he'll go along. It's still a plus, as one legislator put it to Bloomberg News: "99 percent of people won't be able to smoke in working places."

Less happy about that is one Vincent Rennich, of Somers Point. He's a veteran casino worker and non-smoker, recently diagnosed with lung cancer.

"It's a modern-day coal mine in there," he told an interviewer.

Differently disenchanted was Jim Hill, president of a state tavern owners group that estimates its members will lose as much as 50 percent of bar sales. Exempting the gambling giants, he said, is "an outrage to the small, independent bars and taverns who don't have the political clout of the casino industry."

And just think, thanks to legalization of slot-machine casinos, this same aggravation will come inevitably one of these days to a state near you.


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