Would love to go...but I boycott O'fallon for the smoking ban...
Not a bad position actually. Too few are active within local politics to know and understand the impacts.
For those of you interested in Zeke's position some interesting thoughts that seriously parallel the gun issues.
1. Smoking is NOT illegal.
2. The ban tells property owners that their rights as such are null and void, they may NOT allow smoking within their own property unless they have 0 employees.
3. No one ever said a property owner could not make his own establishment non-smoking if he/she chose to do so, but they are forced to do so under the ban.
Unlike some of the other bans that claim not to have hurt business, a lot of business locations are suffering 30 to 50% losses.
The VA has lost 650 members and outside monies are down 20%.
More than one bar is defining that they are almost ready to close, even after investing in building covered patio's to accommodate they are still seeing huge losses and wait staff are hurting badly as tips have declined with the business decline.
There are a LOT of parallels to the government regulation of the other legal activity, firearms. No matter your personal position on smoking, no one forces you to go to a smoking establishment, if there were indeed enough persons bothered by it, they would make business aware and business would respond to it themselves. Since there was not enough call for it, a few enacted a regulation and it has effected a great many in a negative way and many of those effected were nonsmokers.
It is supposed to be about reduced government and increased freedom, not unlike firearms rights, the government continues to do the opposite. How will O,Fallon handle the increased cost to code enforcement while losing the liquor taxes so many of the impacted business locations used to pay? Damn near a perfect example of what is wrong with the government today really, reduce freedoms for everyone, increase cost, and have no clue how to recover.
I did not have time to fool with it Zeke, but a similar ban is all over St Charles politicians radar, it is one of those doo gooder feel good while doing nothing things that they feel makes em shine.