Smokers News

Lawyers representing bars and bingo receptions rooms’ owners asked a Kansas judge to put a delay on the state’s tobacco ban. They declared that it would unfortunately hurt the owners businesses and violate even their constitutional rights to personal property.

Shawnee County District Judge Franklin Theis argued that he would take a decision as quickly as he can whether to solve the recent problem concerning smoking ban.

The defiance was submitted by a group of commercial businesses that argued that the new anti-tobacco law does not treat all of them equally. This is an example of violating the inhabitants’ rights.

However, the new law prohibited smoking in a lot of public places, like bars, restaurants and even some private bars and clubs. Only in casinos it was permitted.

The lawsuit leader was the Downtown Bar and Grill in Tonganoxie, which would close it business if the smoking ban went into effect, reported lawyer Mike Merriam of Topeka. “It is not just losing the clients, but can lose its income,” he added.

Merriam said that the new legislation violated the bar’s property rights, because another law enforced on Jan. 1, 2009 permitted smoking in all private clubs. And also this bar received its private club license on May 2009.

So, the bar transformed to a private club because at that time it didn’t meet Leavenworth County needs that drinking households obtain 30 percent of their incomes from food sales, not because of the tobacco smoking ban. But the owners had expected that becoming a private club, they could continue to permit smoking inside.

While smoking prohibited in other states have tolerated the court challenges, none of them had the kind of befogged classification for concluding where cigarettes smoking was permitted that Kansas does, Merriam reported.

Topeka lawyer Tuck Duncan represents four Wichita-area tobacco businesses who said that the law negotiates the state-owned casino unusual from their businesses. So, only one casino is open, in Dodge City, with a second under building in Kansas City.

Duncan’s clients work Bingo Royale in Haysville, a lot of Bingo Palace sites in Wichita and HEAT bars and Shooters billiard clubs in Wichita. Duncan declared that the same legislation that allows bingo parlors also allows casinos. And while the state supports it has a financial profit in permitting cigarettes smoking for to attract more clients, so do more bingo and billiard passages.

“All my clients want to do is to advance their success and further to the Kansas economy. It indeed needs to go back to the Legislature to correct the problem they originated through their political process,” Duncan concluded.

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