Smoking in AC casinos could be ending this April, or not. If AC’s City Council decides to ban smoking effective April 15, rest assured that I have the requisite T.S. Eliot quote on hand, and I’m not afraid to use it. But nothing is decided yet, as you can see in the AC Press:
About an hour into Wednesday’s final hearing on a proposal that would extend the statewide indoor smoking ban to the resort’s casino floors, Mays Landing resident Cliff Beavers came to the microphone to ask: Why are we here?
“I’m just dumbfounded,” said Beavers, 62, who supports an extension of the smoking ban. “I don’t have anything clever to say. I just thought it was a done deal.”
Others in the 80-person audience in City Council chambers were asking the same thing Wednesday night.
Council plans a final vote at its meeting slated for 5 p.m. Jan. 24. City Councilman G. Bruce Ward, who conceived the idea of the local ordinance and chaired Wednesday’s meeting, indicated he believed the vote would take place.
If passed, the ordinance would ban smoking in public places, effectively closing a loophole by state legislation that went into effect April 15, 2006.
Significantly, the city ordinance would become active April 15, 2007.
Many of the 51 who spoke during the nearly two hour meeting had voiced opinions about a ban before.
Those included Judith States, a smoker and Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino security guard who criticized those who wanted to limit smoking as wanting to infringe on the rights of a person to smoke.
Others, such as Bryant Nelson, said gambling and smoking were vices well-paired together.
“This is not a church that you’re going to,” Nelson said. “This is a gambling hall.”
And Casino Association of New Jersey President Joseph A. Corbo Jr. repeated his earlier statements that a smoking ban would hurt business and likely lead to layoffs.
He objected when ban proponents characterized the casino industry as unconcerned about their workers’ well-being. Untrue, he said. He considered it most important that the casino employees would keep their jobs.
You know, I can’t hear someone say, “This is X not Y,” without thinking of Bones McCoy saying, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a pit boss,” or whatever he was complaining about.
True story: when I first started working security at the Taj, we wore hot pink blazers. I think that someone thought this would make the officers seem less threatening to patrons, and enhance the whole “hospitality” vibe. Unfortunately, it also made us seem less threatened to the assorted thieves, shot takers, and sandfleas who filtered through the place, so I’m not surprised they switched to deep blue and finally to police-style togs.
Anyway, because of the whole hot pink thing, I was sometimes mistaken for a cocktail waiter–at least I think it’s because of the hot pink blazer. So when someone would call me over and ask for a scotch and soda, I’d step back and say, with as polite a look of consternation as I could (our customer service core standards didn’t leave much room for Bones-style curmudgeonhood), “I’m a security officer, not a cocktail waitress.”
If anyone got the joke, they were too pissed about not getting their booze to laugh about it.