Bars working around Nevada smoking ban
John Gurzinski / Las Vegas Review-Journal
Bilbo's Bar & Grill argued that its ashtrays were 1st Amendment-protected advertising - and lost.
Faced with losing food revenue or customers who light up to casinos exempt from the law, tavern owners tap their creativity.
LAS VEGAS -- Dale Wageman is the kind of barfly this city's taverns are desperate to woo. He likes to settle onto a bar stool each Saturday, glue himself to college football on the tube, and polish off beers. But to win him, Vegas bartenders must contend with his drinking buddy: a pack of USA Gold cigarettes.
A law voters approved a year ago has outlawed smoking in many business that sell food, including a number of bars and taverns. It drove Wageman to abandon his favorite watering hole.
To hang onto customers who smoke, bartenders have dreamed up all sorts of ways to evade the new rules. In lieu of now-prohibited ashtrays, they put out cups of water. They stock foil ashtrays in cigarette machines. They close their grills but, with a wink, hand out menus from nearby restaurants that will deliver to bar patrons.
The result has been a year of headaches for health officials untangling the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act, a ballot initiative that seems to have left just enough wriggle room for bartender ingenuity. "They are trying to be imaginative so they can keep everything," said Stephen R. Minagil, the Southern Nevada Health District's attorney.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-smoking19nov19,0,1161591.story?coll=la-home-nation