No Smoking Rooms in Hotels, Soon
Some guests at the Super 8 in West Lincoln learned that the hard way before the hotel eliminated its smoking rooms on the ground floor. Now the hotel has only a dozen rooms in which smoking Kent is allowed, compared to 70 that are smoke-free. “When we’re busy we’ve had people gripe,” said Dawn Jones, the hotel’s general manager.
“It’s mostly truck drivers and, you know, like corporate people, and they always expect you to have a smoking room.”
A smoker herself, she’s happy to oblige when she can.
But soon, her hotel might be forced to give up all its smoking rooms. A judge ruled last week that exemptions to the statewide smoking ban for cigar bars, tobacco stores and hotels are unconstitutional. If the ruling stands on appeal, it would put Nebraska in rare company.
Wisconsin and Michigan are the only two states with laws prohibiting smoking in hotels and motels, according to a new report by the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation. Twenty-five other states, including Nebraska, have laws that limit the percentage of rooms in which smoking can be allowed.
Nebraska’s limit, in place since 2009, is 20 percent.
“If the ruling carries through, every hotel will probably have to go nonsmoking,” said Alice Licht, lobbyist for the Nebraska Hotel and Motel Association.
The order, issued Tuesday by Lancaster County District Judge Jodi Nelson, was in response to a lawsuit by an Omaha pool hall. The attorney for Big John’s Billiards argued that the state’s Clean Air Act offered preferential treatment to some exempted from the ban because they offered no real difference in circumstances than those without exemptions. Licht said the nature of hotels is different than that of bars and retail stores.
“When an individual contracts a room with a hotel … that’s your room,” Licht said. “The flip side is it is a place of employment when people come in to clean it.”
That was Nelson’s point.
“The real issue with this exemption is that these guest rooms are also places of employment,” she wrote in her order. “There is nothing in The Act or in the legislative history to explain why employees of these facilities should be extended less protection from the harms of smoking/secondhand smoke, than employees in other businesses covered by the act.”
Randy Lind, general manager of the Lincoln Airport Holiday Inn, surveyed about 40 hotels and motels in town and found that two dozen offered smoking rooms.
His hotel, which opened in 2008, is not one of them. But he used to work in Omaha and helped transition a hotel there from limited smoking to entirely smoke-free.
“We put our rooms down for about a week and just really deep cleaned them top to bottom,” he said. “It was the case even after the fact that there was still kind of smoke-ish residue.”
Other hotels have paid for costly renovations, including separate ventilation systems, to help accommodate smokers, Licht said.
From a guest perspective, she didn’t seem too concerned. Many smokers are used to going outside to light up, she said, but that’s not the case for everyone.
“I think in this day and age people have gotten more accustomed to non-smoking laws.
“I know that in rural Nebraska this will be somewhat of a problem. … They probably have not heard about this ruling.”
Jones, the Super 8 manager, compared the issue to smoking in bars.
“Eventually they got adapted to it,” she said. “I’m sure they would get adapted to it, but I’m sure you would get some angries.
“You can’t make everybody happy.”
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