Virginia health officials are crisscrossing the state to ensure that restaurants and bars are ready to go smoke-free Dec. 1.
The smoking ban, passed by the General Assembly in February, represents both a grudging compromise between the Kaine administration and Republican lawmakers and an unprecedented departure from Virginia’s permissive tobacco policy.
Some owners are getting ahead of the deadline. Before the bill’s passage, about 66 percent of restaurants in the state already had cut out smoking. Now, at least 73 percent have banned lighting up, said Gary Hagy, who heads the Virginia Department of Health’s division of food and environmental services.
The department has concentrated on reaching out to owners in areas such as Petersburg — which last year had the highest percentage of smoking restaurants in the state — as well as far southwest Virginia and the Eastern Shore, Hagy said. Northern Virginia hasn’t needed much help, he added.
“A lot of the restaurants there were already voluntarily smoke-free,” he said.
That’s not to say that holdouts in the Washington suburbs are happy with the restrictions. The law allows a business to build a walled-off, separately ventilated room for smokers. But that’s not an option for a small bar like Kitty O’Shea’s in Clarendon, owner Danny McFadden said.
“The law allowed for the bigger places to put in a ventilated smoking room,” he said. “But they didn’t allow anything for the smaller places — like, I’m a 50-seater — that have absolutely no room to put in a smoking room.
“What do they expect me to do, build a phone-booth-sized place, and have one person at a time willing to smoke?”
Also exempted from the smoking ban are private clubs — like Veterans of Foreign Wars lodges — as well as outdoor and patio areas.
The law has seen criticism from supporters, too, who say it contains little teeth for enforcement.
Lawmakers likely will revisit elements of the ban next session, especially its scant $25 fine for owners and patrons who flout the restriction, the enforcement of which falls to local authorities.
