Panel Passes Competing Tobacco Bills

SACRAMENTO —  With rival lobbyists battling hard for every vote, a key Assembly committee on Wednesday approved competing tobacco bills--one to ban smoking in public places and a second to ensure smokers’ limited right to light up.

The bills cleared the Assembly Ways and Means Committee with a bare minimum of 11 votes, and head to the Assembly floor, where another showdown awaits.

Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood) won passage of his bill to ban smoking in public places after agreeing to amend it to allow hotel patrons to smoke in their rooms and the lobbies. The bill would prohibit smoking in bars, restaurants, convention halls and all other places where people work.

Vowing to ensure that any amendments will be minimal, Friedman proclaimed that the bill’s passage was the biggest defeat tobacco interests had ever suffered in the state Legislature.

Friedman’s bill is the most ambitious of several measures pushed this year in reaction to a landmark report by the Environmental Protection Agency that declared secondhand tobacco smoke to be a major cause of death.

Last week, two measures died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee that sought to open up tobacco companies to suits by smokers and nonsmokers who blame their illness on cigarette smoke.

Assemblyman Curtis Tucker (D-Inglewood) has fired back with a bill that has won backing from a long list of business groups, led by the state Chamber of Commerce, the California Manufacturers Assn., hotel groups and several restaurants, along with major tobacco companies.

Tucker’s measure seeks to prevent local governments from imposing smoking ordinances, a protection coveted by tobacco companies given the increasing number of city-imposed smoking bans.

Although business owners could ban smoking in their buildings, Tucker’s bill would allow smoking sections in restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, indoor arenas and shopping malls. Smokers who have enclosed offices could smoke, but smokers in open workplaces could light up only if there is ventilation.

Three Assembly Democrats, Dede Alpert of San Diego, Jim Costa of Fresno and Jack O’Connell of Carpinteria, voted for both bills.

Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) cast the deciding vote for Tucker’s bill. Assemblyman Pat Nolan, a Glendale Republican, voted for Friedman’s far more restrictive measure.

“I’ve been really torn,” said Alpert, who wore a no-smoking button on her lapel. While she leaned toward Friedman’s measure, she said, her San Diego district includes hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists and oppose the total ban.

Tucker explained the dual votes by saying that the lawmakers needed “cover.”

“Members are afraid to get painted in the press with a negative brush,” Tucker said. “It can’t hurt me in my district. But there are a lot of other people in marginal districts afraid to get caught up in a controversy.”

Friedman won wide support from such groups as the Heart Assn., the Lung Assn., the California Medical Assn., and the California state labor federation.

Friedman called as a witness Annette U’Ren, a 46-year-old woman from Orange, who told the committee that she was diagnosed as having cancer of the tongue last December and how it spread to her lymph nodes. Her tongue had to be surgically removed and reconstructed.

For 13 years, she worked in an enclosed space next to a chain-smoking woman in Fullerton. All her doctors cited the secondhand smoke as the cause, she said.

“I can’t even swallow,” the woman tearfully told the committee.