The Iowa State Senate recently passed a bill out of committee that would allow local city, county or Boards of Health the power to enact “higher or more stringent” ordinances on smoking in public places. The bill is currently slated to be debated and will be voted on soon after.

Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, who wrote two versions of the bill, said it will see “favorable floor action.”

“The bill gives power back to cities and counties [to enact] local ordinances that more strictly restrict smoking in public places. The ordinances can be more strict than local state law,” Quirmbach said. “The law simply gives power back to local counties to enact smoking ordinances [on their own terms].”

Quirmach wrote the first version of this bill back in the fall of 2000 when he was on the Ames City Council. The bill passed an ordinance for stricter nonsmoking rules; for example, bars and restaurants only permitting smoking after the hours of 8:30 p.m. or the restaurant not having separate designated smoking areas. The bill was a compromise between certain business owners and the city, and business owners complied voluntarily.

However, after being in effect in Ames for 21 months, seven local businesses sued the city. The Iowa Supreme Court eventually repealed the bill because a paragraph’s language conflicted with the state smoking ordinance, and state ordinance takes precedence over local ordinances. Quirmbach has now rewritten the paragraph.

Businesses’ fear of a nonsmoking environment, Quirmbach said, is unfounded since research shows that no-smoking policies don’t cause a loss of revenue. Studies show, he said, that businesses going nonsmoking had “never adversely impacted revenue,” and that 80 percent of the population is nonsmoking, so businesses could “more than make up any lost revenue with nonsmokers.”

Quirmbach said secondhand smoke kills 53,000 people each year, with more than 500 of them being Iowans. This averages out to “more than 10 Iowans a week.”

“I think that tobacco companies are all about profits,” Quirmbach said. “The tobacco companies provide a product that kills its customers.”

This bill is aimed at helping those employed at restaurants and bars, which may inhale secondhand smoke daily, he said.

The bill is not without its detractors, however. Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, has publicly said “the bill is wimpy,” and it doesn’t go far enough. Zaun is in favor of a statewide ban.

“I thought that it was just the easy thing to [do], is to pass the buck to local government. The best thing to do is a statewide ban. Listen, to do this thing, you have to do it statewide,” Zaun said. “This is a wimpy bill. It allows cities to all have different ordinances. [My main concern is that] they all could be different.”

Zaun stresses a statewide ban, but “there just aren’t enough votes for right now.” The bill should be put into place or it should be written to stress uniformity. “I know it’ll pass,” Zaun said.

Matthew Peitz, an Ames resident and ex-smoker, said he would be in favor of the bill, but cities should proceed cautiously.

“I am for the bill to give power to different cites, I just think that local government shouldn’t use it as a carte blanche,” Peitz said. This should be up to the constituents and business owners to decide whether to have smoking or not.”