“I think somebody has to find the right balance (in) allowing business people in a free market to make a profit,” says John Singleton, director of communications for tobacco company Reynolds American. “And you know, a reasonable place to draw the line was the place we were trying to draw the line in Kansas City — and that is that bars and restaurants at a time of night children are not allowed inside was a reasonable place to do it.”
To set a campaign-blurred record straight, the tobacco company contributed to the smoking ban campaign only after being asked to by local businesspeople, who were upfront about doing so with the media. They went to Reynolds because smoking-ban proponents dealt the casinos out of the bill to keep them from contributing to the campaign against it.
“First of all, this is not anything new,” Singleton says. “We’ve worked with lots of communities on opposing smoking bans. … We would never impose on any business group or coalition that didn’t want our help.”
Not that Reynolds is impartial.
“Certainly there is some impact on our business, as we do sell cigarettes to adults,” Singleton says. “Last time I checked they were still legal, and every state collects tens of millions of dollars in taxes and tobacco settlement payments.”
Singleton’s bottom line: “I think the argument is, these are public places, but they’re really not. They’re privately owned places to which the public is admitted. I think that’s a very important distinction that I think is lost sometimes.”
Bans stand
So why haven’t more smoking bans been overturned?
“There has not been a lot of successful rollbacks of smoking bans,” Singleton says. “There’ve been a few — one of the first I can remember was Beverly Hills. One of the reasons there haven’t been more is these small businesses are hit hard by a smoking ban, and sometimes they go out of business pretty quickly. So they’re not around to fight. The other reason is they don’t have a lot of resources as small businesses for prolonged legislative fights.”
Sanitization send-up
New Beaumont Club main man Jon Lunkwicz has done the unthinkable: He has scrubbed down and spruced up the venerable live music and country line dance club — almost beyond recognition. He also penned a thank-you to Beaumont Club patrons to commemorate the ownership change.
“Since 1996, the Beaumont Club has been honored to host a wide variety of artists and events,” it begins, “from Merle Haggard to Jane’s Addiction to Christina Aguilera to Godsmack and especially many of Nashville’s newest artists each year.”
The Nashville connection earned Lunkwicz a shoutout from Keith Urban at his recent Sprint Center show.
Which way is up?
Yet another sporting pundit — this time Playboy’s baseball analyst — is predicting gloom and doom for the Kansas City Royals. The mag forecasts the team to finish in fifth, as in last, place in the American League Central, 27 games out. Right or wrong, Playboy does unleash a bit of interesting spin on our boyz in new blue.
“After a year of observing, GM Dayton Moore, who came from the Braves, began to make changes, including going to Japan to find Trey Hillman, who was named manager after Buddy Bell resigned over differences with upper management.”
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