Published: August 04, 2008 11:44 am      

BAYLOR: Doesn’t New Albany have more important issues?

We’re now told that in spite of all previous indications to the contrary, an anti-smoking ordinance will be ready for voting by the New Albany City Council as early as the Monday meeting.

The dizzying speed with which this ordinance has progressed thus far is so crazily out of step with previous New Albany legislative history that one is compelled to ask whether our council members have been abducted by alien invaders from outer space.

Is there a ransom? Should we even care?

As genuinely relevant issues — redistricting, street repair, rental property regulation, code enforcement, police and fire staffing, and state-imposed budgetary restraints, to name just a few — languish forever in the stagnant backwaters of the council’s traditional attention deficit, a far too hasty smoke screen is being erected to divert and divide the populace.

That’s shameful, because given the length and breadth of pressing issues for the council’s consideration in 2008, workplace smoking simply isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. Without this convenient smoke screen, might a dormant public awaken and ask why the other, far more pertinent issues are not being tackled?

There is infinitely malleable scientific evidence to support both sides of the smoking debate, and I have no interest in examining it, because we all know that statistics can be creatively deployed to argue every which way but loose.

However, it is useful to understand that the anti-smoking position is primarily designed to address a specific argument: Workplace safety. Whether inelegantly cribbed from the Internet like former council chieftain Larry Kochert’s abortive 2006 ordinance, or provided verbatim by the small army of paid lobbyists who gathered to testify at the solitary public hearing smoking, proposed legislation focuses not on customers, but on the safety of workers.

Meanwhile, amid this newfound concern for employees, the council continues to ignore multitudinous safety issues pertaining to where these employees live. Safe housing and ordinance enforcement (or more specifically, New Albany’s abject lack of it) may not bring out the local television cameras, but the health and safety concerns in the city’s myriad unregulated rental properties surely affects as many or more people than workplace smoking.

Bizarrely, the council — especially its resident neighborhood deconstructionists in the 1st and 3rd districts — has consistently shown open hostility toward the concept of a city enforcing its own laws, which begs this question: Will the council enforce its own smoking ordinance?

If so, how hypocritical would this be in light of previous experience? Will there be enforcement of previous ordinances, or just this one? Who decides?

My argument should be fairly clear by now. Precisely because the smoking debate is couched in terms of science, there is little chance of our elected officials grasping it, because the unwritten rules of elected office in New Albany grossly devalue the benefits of education, and inflate the importance of protecting the “little people” from knowledge that might interfere with their hallowed daily superstitions.

Consider the lessons of our city’s past. It is well documented that the EPA has had to threaten New Albany with the nuclear option to force it, kicking and screaming, into repairing decrepit and unhealthy sewers. More recently, a city council that has refused since 1992 to obey its Constitutional mandate to redistrict has simultaneously insisted that redistricting is its sole prerogative, and also that it cannot be compelled to act in any significant way to achieve it.

One thing is clear about the science of an indoor smoking ban. If such a ban posits the necessity of protecting workers from second-hand smoke, it cannot make sense unless it is universal and comprehensive, as a means of protecting all workers, and permitting none of the exemptions and exceptions that shameless ward-heeling amateur alchemists will inevitably seek to disburse like Halloween candy to their cronies.

Imagine the scene as our council persons try to explain how they completely understand that second-hand smoke is bad for a server in one of those restaurants that few of them patronize, but is perfectly acceptable for a bartender in an American Legion hall, ‘cuz gee, they fought for their country and all that.

“They” are the customers, not the workers, but remember that the point is supposed to be protecting workers. How can we protect one worker and not another? If second-hand smoke is bad, doesn’t that mean that it’s bad for all, not for one here, and another there?

Are you starting to feel like the AFLAC duck after his barbershop encounter with Yogi Berra? I am.

Of course, it’s almost as nonsensical to advocate a smoking ban within New Albany proper but not outside the city limits, in the remainder of Floyd County, where the nicotine-addicted will flock unless the county council follows suit.

Would a matching county ordinance be enacted? If not, would there be mass nicotine flight to smoking lounges established in suburbs and exurbs, or by New Age squatters amid the opulent villas of the foreclosure-plagued Woods of Lafayette?

I can see the hand-lettered signs now (most of them illegally erected):

“Smoke free or die”

“Bubba’s ciggies and fireworks”

“Smoke ‘n’ swill @ My Cold Dead Hand” air conditioned lounge

Come to think of it, what’s Mayor Doug England’s position on a potential smoking ordinance? If anyone finds out, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll be examining the efficacy of roadblocks.

Roger Baylor is a New Albany resident and business owner.