At the Capitol

Two political consultants discuss the issues currently being considered at the Arizona Capitol.

Transcript:

Jose Cardenas:
Good evening, thanks for joining us on "Horizon." I'm Jose Cardenas.

Jose Cardenas:
Tonight at midnight the smoking ban passed by voters last November will go into effect. The ban requires that smoking not be permitted in public places including bars and restaurants. Smokers also won't be able to light up within 20 feet of business entrances. Larry Lemmons takes a look at two businesses that will be affected.

Larry Lemmons:
Nixons at the camelback esplanade, it's basically what you might call a political tavern, catering to special political events. It's been around nearly 10 years, and on May 1, will need to adjust to the new smoking ban.

Phil Miglino:
We're dealing with it. It's not a devastating affect on our industry, or my particular business, and I think people will just get used to it.

Larry Lemmons:
But they won't be going smokeless. Like scores of drinking and eating establishments, they'll be taking advantage of the patio loophole.

Phil Miglino:
We have an area that is a patio. We'll be able to use a patio for people to still be able to smoke outside. They left a big hole in the law in the sense that you can smoke, the total exemption is patios. It doesn't matter where it is, as long as it is a patio. And the smoke does not go back into the space, you can use it as a smoking area. And that's where we anticipate doing.

Stephen Abbott:
May 1 the public area.

Consumer: They need more cigar smoking areas.

Larry Lemmons:
Stephen Abbott manages one of the four Churchill Cigar stores in the valley. The store offers a variety of choices for the cigar smoker and a place to enjoy a smoke. More than 51% of his business is tobacco sales. That exempts the store from the law. He thinks business might pick up after the ban takes effect.

Stephen Abbott:
I think it might increase our business. It sounds optimistic, but there's less places to smoke in public areas, and since all four of our locations have sitting areas for smoking, it might increase our business.

Larry Lemmons:
In fact, despite pressures on smokers, he says the cigar trade in his establishment has not declined.

Stephen Abbott:
Not really. If anything, business increases. I don't know why, maybe - I don't know. Business is increasing honestly. It's nothing on a decline. It's almost something to do a hobby, I guess, away, a good way of life, I guess. I don't know.

Larry Lemmons:
Both businesses are affected by the smoking ban, but reflective of the public at large, represent two differing views about smoking.

Stephen Abbott:
Cigarettes seems you get your fix, a cigar you take 45 minutes out of your day, you sit down, you relax, you enjoy your cigar and it's a relaxing feeling. Definitely something to enjoy.

Phil Miglino:
This for me is a family business, and my family works here. And I don't want my family and friends that work here with me exposed to smoke. I'm not that -- I'm not terribly upset about it, and I think if you took a poll of the workers in the esplanade, particularly where I am, you would find most of the employees, the workers and the -- in the bars are happy to see it coming.

Jose Cardenas:
Joining me now to talk about what the smoking ban means and the effort to get it passed, the former chairman of the smoke-free Arizona campaign, Bill Pfeifer, also the president and C.E.O. of the American Lung Association of Arizona. Let's talk about the effort to get it pass. Let's start there.

Bill Pfeifer:
It was a challenge. We -- what we thought was going to be a single issue on the ballot became two different issues, because the tobacco industry came in, I think really at the 11th hour, and successfully qualified for the ballot as well. And of course --

Jose Cardenas:
A competing measure.

Bill Pfeifer:
A competing measure that would allow smoking in bars. As they wanted it. Fortunately although they spent -- outspent our campaign 8-1, they spent nearly $9 million on their campaign. I think the voters were wise and really sent a message to the tobacco industry that said they don't trust their ability to protect the public's health. They -- they trusted organizations like the American Lung Association and the heart association to truly protect the public's health.

Jose Cardenas:
What exactly will the ban do? What will be the difference between somebody going into a restaurant right now, this evening, and what will happen after midnight?

Bill Pfeifer:
Midnight tonight the slaw going to go into effect and prohibit smoking in all enclosed public places and workplaces. That includes all restaurants and bars. But it's all workplaces. Effective tonight at midnight. You will have to prohibit smoking inside those buildings. And not only that, there will be other relatively easy requirements. You have to post a sign, entrance into your building that complies with the state law. You can produce your own sign or the state of Arizona actually has them free of charge, and you can post one of those signs. I think what people can expect is going to see a really a clearing of the air throughout all workplace and businesses, and public places in the state of Arizona.

Jose Cardenas:
The signs say "no smoking."

Bill Pfeifer:
They're pretty generic. They have the international no smoking symbol with the citation for the law, plus also a website address for -- from the department of health as well as a toll-free telephone number.

Jose Cardenas:
So all those people in my building, downtown phoenix, who used to go into the garage in the winter time, they can't do that?

Bill Pfeifer:
They won't be able to do it inside the garage, because that will be a confined space. Unless maybe they're on the top floor outside. I think that's going to be the issue. If people just really look at it and say, am i indoors, smoking is going to be prohibited. If they are outdoors, as defined by the department of health services, then the business establishment could have a smoking patio in that particular case.

Jose Cardenas:
Legislation was approved in November, it's almost the beginning of may, why so long before implementation?

Bill Pfeifer:
We gave careful consideration of that. We spent some time talking to some of the parties that had a stake in this. One of being the Arizona restaurant association. And really working with them, we thought, we needed to give business owners time to really understand what the law was all about, and make the adjustments. So we wanted it -- we wanted to give that six-month period for the businesses, but we also wanted to give time for our department of health to write the rules for how they were going to go about implementing that law. And we could have rushed that, but you know, we did not think that was a wise course. We wanted to make sure our department of health really had adequate time to write a good set of rules, number Wynn, but more importantly, that they got input from the business community from the general public on those rules. And as a matter of fact, our initiative said that they had to have one public hearing. Actually, the department of health went better and did three public hearings. One in Phoenix, one in Tuscon, and one in Flagstaff. And they listened, I think, to what the community had to say about the law and made some adjustments to the rules. They couldn't change the law because the voters had voted on that, but they could make some adjustments on the rules.

Jose Cardenas:
The 20-foot limitation, how was that determined and how will it be enforced?

Bill Pfeifer:
In the law, in the initiative we passed, we said a reasonable distance. And we wanted to leave that that way, because we wanted the department of health at this time in writing the rules to determine what was a reasonable distance. And the department of health felt it was very important thou that they clearly established a footage. Initially the -- it was 15 feet that they were proposing. After doing some research and after hearing from some others in the community, they establish add 20-foot. Most notably they really looked at some research done out of Stanford University in which they had done the studies of outdoor cigarette smoke, and they felt 20-foot was really the mark they needed to go with.

Jose Cardenas:
Presumably if you go through the restaurant right into the patio, you're not going to have to go another 20 feet before you can smoke.

Bill Pfeifer:
I think what they're going to try to do, 20 feet within an entrance to the building. However, the patio, the important part here is that the patio is a separate part, and there's a separate doorway to that patio. There they don't have to provide the 20-foot barrier. Provided, this is a key important fact, that is, provided cigarette smoke doesn't come back into that building in any way.

Jose Cardenas:
You have to have some kind of system to take the smoke away.

Bill Pfeifer:
And if it does, it's not far enough. They then need to move the smokers away.

Jose Cardenas:
You heard the gentleman on the video talk about a pretty big hole, and he was referring to the patio exception. Is that your view of it?

Bill Pfeifer:
No. It wasn't a loophole, it was designed that way. As we were really drafting the initiative, we looked at this and said, where will we be able to allow smoking? We thought it was important to be reasonable in bringing this law to the voters of Arizona. And we felt one of the key places that we needed to allow for business, and again, coming from working with the restaurant association, is saying, listen, we need to provide them a place where they could allow their smoking patrons to go, outdoors on an outdoor patio where the smoke could anticipate into the air relatively easy was really the place to allow smoking. By no means was it a loophole, it was designed that way.

Jose Cardenas:
How will this be enforced?

Bill Pfeifer:
We gave a lot of thought to the issue. When we were riding -- writing our initiative, we weren't the first. We had at the time about seven other states that had written and passed some time of -- type of comprehensive law. We looked at them, and one of the shies that stood out that was lacking was good, defined enforcement. So we spent the time to really look at the issue of enforcement. This is a public health issue. We felt the enforcement needed to reside with the public health agency responsible in this state of Arizona, and for us that's the Arizona department of health services. So we really delegated the enforcement to that agency. But then we wanted to do something else. As we were meeting again with stakeholders who were going to be responsible, they said, don't give us an unfunded mandate. Don't tell us enforce this law, but we're not going to give you any resources to do that. So that's why we put the two pennies on a pack of cigarette tax. To really provide the necessary funding to the department of health to enforce the law. They are going to then write agreement, they've already done this, and those agreements are with the local county health departments. Those local county health departments will be on the ground folks who will be doing the compliance checks.

Jose Cardenas:
Regular inspectors?

Bill Pfeifer:
The folks who are normally doing restaurant and bar inspections or any type of business inspections are going to be charged with doing the compliance checks.

Jose Cardenas:
We're almost out of time. Summarize how important this legislation is to the your organization.

Bill Pfeifer:
I think to our organizations, American lung, American heart, American cancer society, this was a critical piece of legislation. I've been doing this 27 years. Three other different states. I believe this is the most significant public health measure that i have personally been involved in. This is going to help save lives in Arizona.

Jose Cardenas:
Bill Pfeifer, thanks for joining us on "horizon."

Jose Cardenas:
Every Monday evening we feature two political analysts or consultants going head-to-head on issues that affect Arizona. The house appropriations committee pass add $10.6 billion budget package tonight, one of the topics to be discussed by Jaime Molera of the Molera Alvarez Group, and Sam Coppersmith, of Coppersmith Gordon Schermer and Brockelman, a law firm.

Sam Coppersmith:
First let's start with the budget. I understand we get to maybe possibly kind of see one. We're after the target date for adjournment, in both chambers, entirely different philosophies about how you move any sort of budget forward. But the overall thing is last year, budgeting was fun. Revenues were running ahead of what people were expecting, you could choose from call up a and b by saying both. This year not nearly as much fun for anybody involved.

Jaime Molera:
I'm not sure budgeting is ever fun. One of the of things I think needs to be talked about is how in the senate side, I think president b has done a very masterful job of being in control, because one of the things that people understood is coming into this legislative session, the moderates of the republican party were going to have a big session, in the house and the senate, just the way the numbers worked out. You had enough democrats, combined with the moderates to block any kind of conservative base initiative to dominate the budget. One of the things --

Sam Coppersmith:
And the senate has reacted to that the, but the house really hasn't. The house has tried to run under the old rules.

Jaime Molera:
President Bee has incorporated that into his philosophy and into associations, and been in control of it. So you don't have the side deals taking place between some of the moderate members and the democratic leadership or the governor's office. I think the house leadership is still pushing for some of the things that are part of the core republican philosophy. For instance, tax cuts. I think that's one of the areas I think the governor's office and moderates and democrats have to tread lightly. Arizonans like tax cuts. This notion we're not going to have any tax cut in this budget, or very moderate one, some of the rumors we're having, five, $6 million tax cut, I'm not sure it's going to sell very well. I think that's something they need to take into consideration.

Sam Coppersmith:
Except I think you're seeing on the national level, the republicans are saying, it was all about the spending. But I don't think that plays at the state level. At the state level people expect things from governor. And you can't build freeways, you can't educate kids with basically rhetoric. And -- or ideology. It would be nice if you could do it, if you could snap your fingers or create something, but I think most people know, particularly at the state level, where there's much more of a direct connection between what the governor is doing and -- government is doing and seeing dirt turned in the ground or seeing kids educated, the idea that somehow you can do this without money, you know, you have to live in a much -- you have to only talk to people who agree with you to think that's the case.

Jaime Molera:
Now we're going to turn to national scope. You talk about -- and talk about Senator McCain. I want to say first, the rumors of Senator McCain's demise are very, very premature. Senator McCain, who has been criticized for being too close to bush, who's been criticized on the right for being too much like bush, or not close enough to bush, I think it's starting to -- people are starting to see from the republican primary standpoint, he really is starting to coalesce his constituency, coalesce folks that are looking -- some of the key battle ground states, some of the key things he's looking for, foreign policy. He's not -- one of the things he scored on is he's not been willing to say everything has gone perfectly, that what we've done in Iraq, even though he sports it, has -- supports it, has been a-ok. He knows there's been a lot of flaws. But what he has talked about is how do you build a much bigger policy around this? And that's one of the things I think he's going to be very, very formidable as this summer and fall go on, going on into next year, Senator McCain will be the man to beat in the republican primary for that reason alone. He brings to the table a strong conservative philosophy and talks about the things that republicans want to hear. Which is why I think this notion of what the media has been talking about what mc-- that McCain is done for is ludicrous.

Sam Coppersmith:
Here's why it's not ludicrous. I know you've got to say that, but -- here's why it's not ludicrous. The first is, here's one example. Of senator McCain's troubles with the Republican base. He actually has a for pro-life, almost an absolute doubt line antiabortion pro-life voting record, yet the national right to life people don't trust him, largely because of campaign finance reform. They care more about being able to raise that money and spend it --

Jaime Molera:
That's where -- Disconnect between the -- these organizations, that certainly care about their funding streams and the people in the organizations, the grass-roots people, the people who live in New Hampshire, the people who live in South Carolina, they're going to see what John McCain stands for, and they're going to be for him.

Sam Coppersmith:
Let me walk you through this. So there's this disconnect and those organizations I think have a disproportionate effect in a low turnout primary vote. They are angry at McCain in ways they're not at Mitt Romney who has flip-flopped to beat the band on this issue. I may have more to say on this issue. But I think we need to talk about the -- they're remaking a movie in Washington. It's called dead man walking. I think at this point it's pretty clear that the incumbent, Rick Renzi, is not going to run for reelection in 2008. The only question is -- what I find most interesting about this is, there's really nothing other than an F.B.I. raid of -- of his wife's business. There's nothing we know now that we didn't know six months ago. But seeing it in the "Wall Street Journal" has just made everyone believe it must be true in ways -- because local media can't -- they weren't willing to cover the story until somebody came in from outside, said this important and now they're racing to play catch up by publishing all sorts of inside baseball, without attribution. All sorts of Republican insiders talking about how he's going to resign without any names being mentioned.

Jaime Molera:
Congressman Renzi is in trouble, there's no doubt about it. It's clear also his fund-raising abilities are somewhat diminished. The issue is whether or not the democrats are going to be able to capitalize. And in that regard I just don't believe that they are. I know they're salivating, I know they're starting to foam at the mouth.

Sam Coppersmith:
What they're seeing is an issue environment nationally that favors them, and the fact that this never happens. They finish the 2006 cycle, the democratic house committee had four times as much in the banks as the republicans. When does that happen?

Jaime Molera:
I think you're seeing Ken Bennett, Bill, very strong republicans that will be --

Sam Coppersmith:
A Republican even -- Democrats like -- it will be very interesting.

Jaime Molera:
Let's talk about immigration.

Sam Coppersmith:
Isn't everybody.

Sam Coppersmith:
Am I supposed to march tomorrow or not? I can never keep it straight.

Jaime Molera:
One of the things I think it's very, very clear is that the republican administration, president bush administration, and some of the key leadership in the republican party, is afraid all the democrats have forced this issue. As much as they talked about it in the first hundred days that they're going to make this the key issue, it hasn't happened. And I think it's clear, it's very, very clear that because of the leadership of the administration and pushing this forward, I think finally, finally, especially from a state like ours that really needs to have a meaningful comprehensive immigration reform policy, we're going to see it happen. One of the things, it's amazing to me, is a lot of democrats keep attacking the notion that we've got to have security, that we've got to have enforcement. We've got to have a way to make sure this is a temporary program. One of the things I think is clear is that we know we have to have an immigration reform that makes sure this is not a permanent fixture. And I'll give an example. In the mid 1990's when construction is booming, we needed to have a work force that dealt with that issue. But now we have an abundance of the workers and it's hard for people to find work. That's why it's important to have industries that are temporary where people can come in and out as needed. I think that's some of the things that are starting to win out as part of this debate.

Sam Coppersmith:
I don't know. I think you're being overoptimistic about what's there, because I think the strains between the president and the folks who are left in congress in his party on this issue, I think there's a huge gulf there. Were to the -- what happened with the swing districts in moderate districts, those were the people who tended to lose. Those were the republicans I think that the president could find common ground with. I don't think that the democrats in the house, particularly in the senate, are going to bend over backwards to help the president.

Jaime Molera:
You don't think the gulf is also between the democrats that support the unions as enamored with some of the immigration reform efforts, as opposed to --

Sam Coppersmith:
From their perspective, they're happy with the president taking the lead on this issue, because it takes the spotlight off them.

Jaime Molera:
They can't take the spotlight off it because they are in leadership now in the house and the senate.

Sam Coppersmith:
But you led with the president. Final thought? Jaime think, what I wanted to get to, was attractive in 2000 to independents and swing democrats because he seemed to speak to them. He seemed to represent a republican party that went beyond the base and spoke to issues they cared about. The problem is now in running 17 for 2008, he is speaking to a much different audience. And in 2000 the fact that he was probably more aggressive in terms of our foreign policy, didn't matter as much as his reform agenda domestically. Now that's entirely flipped. He is leading with this very aggressive foreign policy, use of force, and whatever his criticisms of the administration, he is speaking more -- he does a better bush than bush. And so the problem will be the people who are attracted to him in 2000 are not the people who will vote for him in 2008. There's only one group in America who really stole support to the war in Iraq, and they're called republican primary voters.

Jaime Molera:
In 2008 I'll replay this tape when he's president. I think recent stories that have come out on the immigration debate that have talked a lot about the fissure within the Hispanic ranks about how to bring about meaningful immigration reform are important to talk about. Because the Hispanic groups in my opinion tend to be more about who's in control, what organization is seen as the lead, as opposed to bringing about meaningful policy. One of the things that Is find very disturbing is that the knee-jerk reaction about anybody that brings out a proposal, if they have an r next to their name is automatically taken to be not good. I think that's one of the things these organizations will continue to be on the fringe if they don't start picking the meaningful policy that is important for Hispanics in this country.

Sam Coppersmith:
and their friend Russell Pierce.

Merry Jane Lucero:
Tuesdays we begin airing new segments from our series "Arizona stories." these feature stories are rich in-depth examinations of the people, places, and legends that shaped Arizona's history, and the events that define our legacy. Arizona stories begin Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. on "horizon."

Jose Cardenas:
Wednesday we'll take a closer look into hour your kids are being tested in school. Thursday we'll delve into the mystery of the disappearing bees. Friday, don't forget to join us for the journalists' round table.

Jose Cardenas:
That's the Monday night edition of "Horizon." I'm Jose Cardenas. Thanks for watching.