David Rabin on How Smoking Ban Has Sparked Other Problems

David Rabin is the owner of a nightclub, Lotus, in the Meatpacking District, and the president of the 150-member New York Nightlife Association. He spoke last week to The New York Sun’s Eric Wolff.Q. Your organization is pretty opposed to the smoking ban. Why?A. There’s a lot of different areas that are problematic, but I think overall our opinion was that the ban was not intelligently crafted and could easily have been created in such a way to conserve business while at the same time answering the concerns of employee health, which was what it supposedly was constructed for in the first place.We presented in Albany a broad coalition and presented what we thought was a very reasonable amendment to the ban last summer, and it looked like it had a great deal of support in the state Legislature, and at the last minute that support evaporated. We don’t know why.What was your amendment?Our amendment said basically the following: If you met the 60/40 test – meaning that 60% or more of your revenue is derived from non-food sources – so if you were primarily a bar, club, or tavern and you were a 60/40 establishment, if you met that test and if you installed state-of-the-art, New York State Department of Health-approved air filtration equipment,… then you would have been exempt from the provisions of the smoking ban. This equipment is exactly the same as they use in hospitals for infectious-disease wards. They’re the size of humidifiers, and two of them can filter the air in a 2,500-square-foot bar and keep it cleaner than the air outside. The mayor’s point, and Health Commissioner Thomas Friedan’s point, back when this bill first came up, is that this is going to save 1,000 lives a year. Our response was, everyone knows smoking is not good for you, but please don’t tell us that three bartenders per day are dying of second-hand smoke. It would make it more hazardous than coalmining in West Virginia. It was just factually incapable of being proved. But that was the propaganda, and it worked. It’s very hard to argue economics against health.There’s no question there’s been huge economic fallout from this bill. I have a study we did. The fallout has been more severe with the pub and tavern industry than with the nightclub industry. I think a lot of Irish bars, a lot of honky-tonk kind of places, a lot of little neighborhood pubs have suffered greatly on an economic level.The more broad and far-reaching problem, from my perspective, has been the proximity of residential tenancies with nightlife. I’m on Community Board 5 in Manhattan, and I’m on the Quality of Life Committee of Community Board 5, I’ve been there for three-and-a-half years, so I hear these complaints first hand all the time. The no. 1 issue between nightlife and residents is not what goes on inside the establishments. People could care less. What they’re concerned about is what happens in the street in front of their building at two, three, four in the morning.The bars are locked between a rock and a hard place. If we keep ’em inside and let ’em smoke we get fined, and we risk losing our business. If we let ’em outside to smoke, we risk getting fined for failure to control the premises, because we have noise in the streets, and if you get too many of those tickets, we go up for renewal, they say: Why would we renew you? You’re a neighborhood menace.You seem really suspicious of Mayor Bloomberg’s motives in supporting the ban. Why?Not at all. I think his motives were pure. I think his judgment was impure. Is anyone going to say it wouldn’t be a better world if people didn’t smoke? No, it would be absurd. The Bloomberg administration has claimed, I think speciously claimed, that this has created a great number of jobs.My problems with that are several fold. First of all, the year of comparison is 2002, the pre-ban year. That was one of the worst years in the history of the hospitality industry – they might as well have used 1929. Coming post-9/11 and mid recession, 2002 was really a year that places barely stayed in business. So to say business has been up since 2002: What a shock! I don’t think you’ll ever find someone in the bar business tell you there’s been an increase in customers since the ban went into effect.You know, I’m not a smoking advocate. The irony of this bill is I’m an antismoker my whole life.We’ve talked a lot about Mayor Bloomberg as the face of the smoking ban, but at this point the state has the stricter ban, and more state bans are coming. Aren’t you bucking a trend?For me, the ban is the root of all other issues. The fact that there’s a new noise code pending, the fact that bars are more severely fined for external noise, the fact that it’s more difficult to get a new liquor license, the fact that people are trying to get the State Liquor Authority localized.There’s a mayoral election coming up. Among the likely candidates, do you think any of them will be more sympathetic to your plight?I don’t even think Bloomberg realizes the fear and concern that his administration raised within our industry. I don’t think it has gotten to his level yet, that there’s not a lot of trust regarding his administration from our industry, there’s a great deal of fear about what might happen in a second Bloomberg administration. I don’t think the field has set itself yet. I don’t know that we will endorse anyone at all.You know, the zoning thing is going to be a problem. What many responsible operators have done is go to where it’s zoned for nightlife. There’s tremendous growth in nightlife in West Chelsea – Marquis, Crobar, Spirit, Bungalow, Lot 61, which are all members – well, now they’re proposing to rezone that neighborhood for mixed use. And it’s like they’re pulling the rug out from under people.Okay, you want to put residential building on the same block where three years ago you licensed a mega-club or three mega-clubs? Then make those buildings make certain different building codes, don’t retroactively force the nightclubs to soundproof themselves to a much, much higher standard.Make the building have triple-thick windows and make the building have double-thick walls, so that if the developer wants a variance to build in that area, there’s an acknowledgment by the city that this is a viable, thriving industry, which is a reason many tourists come to New York, and we should protect the industry as well, and the reputation of New York as well as the city that never sleeps.

David Rabin on How Smoking Ban Has Sparked Other Problems

David Rabin on How Smoking Ban Has Sparked Other Problems

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