Study: residents want smoke-free businesses
The City Council will vote on the issue Monday.
Published Oct. 6, 2006
A smoking ban for bars and restaurants in Columbia might encourage more people to patronize those establishments, according to a recent MU study.
According to the study conducted by two MU professors, 93 percent of people would go to restaurants as much or more often if they were smoke-free. Eighty-five percent said the same for bars.
The Columbia City Council will vote Monday whether to pass a citywide indoor smoking ban for most public places, which includes restaurants and bars.
"The study may influence the City Council's decision on Monday," said Domingo Pacheco, vice president of Peers Against Secondhand Smoke. "It adds validity to what every other study that has shown. They all show similar percentages."
Pacheco said he compared surveys from the Wellness Resource Center, the Americans for Nonsmokers Rights organization and conducted his own unofficial survey.
"Regardless of the choices individuals make, the smoking ban will still harm select businesses in town," said Glenn Nielsen, founding member of the Boone Liberty Coalition.
Becky Reynolds, the owner of Cody's, a country-western bar in Columbia, said most of her customers who smoke are regulars.
"The 85 percent of people who said they would go out to bars more often don't go out enough to make up for the 85 percent of my regular customers who would stop coming because they couldn't smoke in here," she said.
Professors Kevin Everett and Dan Longo of the MU department of family and community medicine designed the MU study with questions related to smoking in businesses.
"We wanted to do the survey because we know there are a lot of issues with tobacco and, more specifically, with second-hand smoke across the country," Everett said.
After the survey was designed, the University of South Carolina's Institute for Public Service and Policy Research was contracted to conduct the survey. The University of South Carolina surveyed more than 700 people with Columbia telephone numbers through phone surveys.
After receiving the data from the University of South Carolina, Longo, Everett and their staff analyzed the data and determined that Columbia appears to be a city with community support for smoke-free workplace ordinances and smoke-free bars and restaurants, Longo stated in an MU news release.
The survey also determined that 69 percent of Columbians support laws that would make all indoor areas of restaurants smoke-free, and 57 percent support laws that would make all indoor areas of bars smoke free.
"In addition, the study concluded more people than not prefer smoke-free restaurants and bars," Everett said in the news release.
The study was funded by a grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health and will be published in the November/December issue of Missouri Medicine.
Dean Andersen, of the Boone County Coalition on Tobacco Concerns, said he hopes this study shows the City Council that "there is popular public support for this kind of ordinance."
