State battles wishful thinking on smoking ban

Some bar owners and managers across the state think they have found an escape clause in the state's new smoking ban.

State officials are about to snuff out those plans.

Ann Houston Staples, the Charlotte-based communications director for the state's anti-smoking efforts, said health officials are encountering bar operators who think that, as a private club or by becoming a private club, they can still let customers smoke.

"I'm getting spooked, because everybody I talk to said the place they go to is going to become a private club," said Staples, director of public education and communication for the Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Staples is part of a team assembling an information packet that will go out in the coming weeks to businesses affected by the ban, including bars. The mailing will include a letter explaining the law and other material, such as free "No Smoking" signs.

The ban on smoking in bars and restaurants that the legislature passed this year takes effect Jan. 2 and does include an exemption for private clubs, but it defines them as country clubs or nonprofits, such as an Elks Lodge.

"It's not clear in some people's minds," said Paul Stone, president of the N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association, who supported including private club bars in the ban so that they would be on equal footing with his members, bars that also serve food.

In North Carolina, bars that do not serve food effectively have to be designated as a private, members-only club, but it's a distinction without a difference. The so-called private clubs frequently charge a nominal membership fee and may take few - if any - steps to check whether a patron is a member.

Jeff Shelffo, owner of The Other Woman private sports bar in Charlotte, initially thought the smoking ban would bring a windfall.

"We were under the impression our business would pick up," he said, "because people around us, restaurants and bars, would ban smoking, and the smokers would come to us."

Ultimately he requested information about the law from the health department that explained that the ban applied to his bar, too.

This month, a group of UNC-Chapel Hill graduate students working with Staples' office on a smoking ban project visited bars around the Triangle, talking to owners, employees and customers and found "real confusion" about the law, Staples said.

The news media sometimes have helped muddy the understanding by not spelling out what the law means by a "private club."

"All the publicity was that all private clubs are exempt," said William Potter, a Raleigh lawyer who represents several nightclubs and bars.