City council to consider secondhand smoke in casinos

5th January 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Susan bad credit personal loans that are not payday loans Buchanan
Contributing Writer

New employees at Harrah’s New Orleans on Canal St. and other casinos across the nation sign forms acknowledging that they’ll be working in a smoking environment. Dealers, who invest time and money in their own career training, sign these forms to land a new job, associate director Bronson Frick of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights said last week. Other prospective, smoking and non-smoking workers who need jobs sign them.

Early this year, the New Orleans City Council will consider a ban on smoking in casinos and stand-alone bars after the state outlawed it in restaurants and offices in 2007.

“When cities pass strict, smoke-free workplace laws, evidence shows sharp declines in heart attacks, strokes, heart and lung disease, cancer and other health impacts, along with savings in healthcare costs,” said Frick, based in California. “Everyone has the right to breathe. Employees in smoke-filled casinos can’t postpone their need to catch a breath of air.”

He noted that Caesars operates wholly or partly smoke-free casinos in states with no-smoking laws or where demand for smokeless gaming exists. Caesars Growth Partners, a subsidiary of Ceasars Entertainment Corp. in Nevada, owns Harrah’s New Orleans.

“Lots of people said airlines would never ar-rajhi personal loan interest be able to eliminate smoking sections on planes but they managed to do it 25 years ago,” Frick said. Smoking in the United States has declined since, especially in the last five years. “Today 82 percent of Americans don’t smoke,” he said. “You have many visitors to New Orleans and its gaming establishments who don’t smoke.” Harrah’s New Orleans, like a number of other Caesars’ properties, has a hotel.

On November 21, Councilmem­bers LaToya Cantrell and Susan Guidry co-sponsored legislation prohibiting smoking in city businesses, including casinos and bars. “It will first go to the council’s community development committee on January 7 at 10:00 in the morning,” Cantrell spokeswoman Anna Nguyen said last week. While no date has been set for a council vote, Cantrell aims to have one before March 1, Nguyen said.

“We continue to lose many good people, precious people, to cancer, and it is preventable,” Councilmember Cantrell said last week. “The time has come for us to stand up and protect our workers, especially in bars and casinos.”

Logan Gaskill, human resources vice president at Harrah’s New Orleans, last week confirmed that new employees at the casino sign forms saying they’ll work in a smoking atmosphere. “But the casino also takes extra steps to protect ez payday loan waukesha safety through sophisticated ventilation systems,” he said. “On a normal day, the amount of fresh air introduced by the casino is more than 250 percent of what regulations require. Even on the busiest days, like New Year’s Eve, our system provides more than 200 percent of the required amount of fresh air.” He said the casino’s high-efficiency air filters do more than 15 times the filtration typically done by residential HVAC systems.

Gaskill said to his knowledge smoking-environment forms signed by Caesars’ employees haven’t been the subject of litigation in Louisiana, Nevada or elsewhere.

If smoking were prohibited in New Orleans gaming spots, customers would go to establishments in other areas, affecting the city’s jobs and state and local coffers, according to casino operators. Gaskill pointed to mid-December estimates from the Louisiana State Police, which has a gaming enforcement division, that New Orleans in two years could lose over $86 million in gaming revenue and $17.4 million in fees paid to the state if such a ban passed. Those projections are based on smoking prohibitions elsewhere, including Delaware and Atlantic City, N.J.

Gaskill also referred to a 2010 report from the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, citing data from the Illinois Casino Gaming Association that casino revenue advance fast loan payday fell 19 percent in the first year after that state banned smoking in them in early 2008. Critics of the data said that a general economic downturn was also partly to blame. The St. Louis Fed did its own study and found a 22 percent revenue decline at the nine casinos in Illinois during the period. Casinos in three nearby states, Iowa, Missouri and Indiana, suffered roughly the same weak economic conditions but the only steep revenue losses were in Illinois establishments, where smoking had been outlawed, the St. Louis Fed said.

Allowing revenue concerns to trump health could be costly, however. “No level of secondhand smoke exposure is safe, and ventilation systems don’t eliminate toxins,” Bronson Frick said.

Breathing secondhand smoke from cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products has immediate, harmful health effects, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Secondhand smoke from the end of a cigarette or cigar, along with that exhaled by smokers, contains over 7,000 chemicals, of which hundreds are toxic and about 70 can cause cancer, the CDC says. Since 1964, 2.5 million non-smoking, American adults have died from breathing secondhand smoke, the disease center estimated this year.

This article originally published in the January 5, 2105 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.