Smoke-free Cedar Rapids casino remains iffy

RIVERSIDE - Dan Franz said last week that the Riverside Casino and Golf Resort here never forgets its good fortune.

The eight-and-half-year-old casino south of Iowa City is constantly reminded that it enjoys a special exemption from Iowa's Smokefree Air Act, an arrangement that allows gamblers to smoke even if they can't eat and/or drink and smoke in restaurants and bars across the state, said Franz, the Riverside facility's general manager.

'The law now says that we're able and fortunate enough to serve both smokers and non-smokers,” he said. 'And that's what we try to do.”

Once again this year, the state's anti-smoking forces are back at the Iowa Legislature to seek among other things a ban on smoking at Iowa's 19 state-licensed casinos.

This year's new wrinkle comes from legislators who represent the city of Cedar Rapids and Linn County and who have introduced a long-shot hope that the Iowa Legislature will agree to a test and create up to two non-smoking casinos in Iowa - one of which would be in Cedar Rapids.

The bill plies old ground where arguments remain cemented in place since Iowa adopted a ban on smoking in bars, restaurants, outdoor entertainment events, places of employment and office buildings in 2008 while giving casino gambling floors a pass.

Anti-smoking advocates such as Cedar Rapids lawyer Gary Streit, a spokesman for the American Cancer Society, say the facts are clear - secondhand smoke endangers the health of casino customers and employees.

On the other side, casino owners say a ban of smoking from casino floors would mean big revenue losses for Iowa's state-licensed casinos, causing a ripple effect of layoffs, a drop in state tax revenue and less casino revenue for local charities.

Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett said that getting any change in smoking in Iowa's casinos or having the state experiment with a first non-smoking casino remains a 'difficult” task.

Already, more-ambitious legislation designed by Corbett to reform Iowa's casino gambling industry in several ways - including a provision to send more casino revenue to Iowa's 84 non-casino counties - has been gutted.

The bill now under consideration has one focus: It would require the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission to award up to two state gambling licenses for smoke-free casinos, with Cedar Rapids competing to be one of the two.

Changing the debate

The bill shifts the debate a bit. Last April, the state commission rejected a gambling license for Cedar Rapids, saying a Cedar Rapids casino would take too much business from other casinos, particularly Riverside. In response, Corbett said Iowa needs to a smoke-free casino, and Cedar Rapids is eager to be the test case. A smoke-free casino is a different product, and it will cause less harm to business at smoking casinos, he said.

Corbett said the proposal would be helped if anti-smoking forces sign on to it, particularly now that the state of Iowa and many of its communities, including Cedar Rapids, are pushing wellness initiatives such as the Blue Zones project. But the anti-smoking advocates may not sign on. For them, it may be a choice between a smoke-free casino experiment now or fighting to ban smoking later on in all of them, he said.

Corbett also said he is hoping that newer legislators who have never participated in a debate on the state's gambling industry may want to now.

Case in point is first-term Rep. Ken Rizor, a Republican from Linn County, who submitted the non-smoking-casino bill in the Iowa House last week, along with veteran lawmaker Todd Taylor, a Democrat from Cedar Rapids.

Rizor said the bill calls for the creation of a smoke-free-casino 'pilot project” and would require the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission to create 'a new category” of licenses for up to two smoke-free casinos.

The commission then would be required to report annually on the financial impact to the state's casino industry.

'The idea is to explore if smoke-free casinos are the way we want to go,” Rizor said. 'And my view of that is, I don't like the fact that casinos are the only businesses in Iowa that are excluded from the law of being smoke free. I think there are a lot of people who don't like going to a casino and coming out smelling like a smokestack.”

‘Plenty of opportunity'

A visit to one of the front lines of the Iowa casino-smoking debate - the casino floor at the Riverside Casino and Golf Resort - reveals a casino industry that is ready to defend itself.

During an interview last week, Riverside's general manager Dan Franz pointed to the left side of the casino's circular gambling floor, where each bank of slot machines featured a prominently displayed, non-smoking sign on top of it.

Franz had numbers, too, that seemed to tilt in favor of non-smokers. He said 56 percent of the casino's slot machines are in the casino's smoking area, 44 percent in the non-smoking area. Yet, 64 percent of money bet on the slots is bet on the smoking side, only 36 percent on the non-smoking side.

'You balance it out as much as you can,” he said. 'But there's plenty of opportunity to play on both sides.”

Franz did not insist that the casino offers two worlds entirely separate from the other.

One of the casino floor's big attractions, for example, is a car ready to be won and spinning atop a bank of slot machines on the non-smoking side of the casino. There, smokers and non-smokers can compete.

Franz said the base of each bank of slot machines is part of a ventilation system that circulates air, and he said he never smells smoke on his clothes. Even so, you can still find smoke, he said.

'The reality of it is, if you're sitting and playing at a machine right next to a heavy smoker, the air handling system isn't necessarily going to do too much,” Franz said.

As for employees' exposure to smoke, he said most of the Riverside Casino's 700 employees - about half whom are full-time - don't work on the casino floor. The rest of the facility, except for one floor of the hotel and the golf course, is smoke-free.

On occasion, employees might ask about the casino's prohibition against facial hair or visible tattoos, but no employee has ever asked not to work in a smoking area, he said.

Franz said a modern casino such as the Riverside Casino has gone a long way to accomplishing what a smoke-free Cedar Rapids casino would.

'I just think in today's world, we've taken the smoking and non-smoking into consideration,” he said. '…

There are definitely people who will say, ‘I can't come down because the smoke is so bad.' But you're not going to be able to satisfy some of those extreme cases, no matter how hard you try.”

DRAWING conclusions

Riverside's Franz and Wes Ehrecke, the president and chief executive officer of the Iowa casino industry's Iowa Gaming Association, said there is no question that a ban on smoking in Iowa casinos would hurt Iowa's casino industry significantly.

Ehrecke said Iowa's three tribal casinos, including the casino at the Meskwaki Indian Settlement west of Tama, would expand to welcome gamblers who smoke, while some smokers would go to Missouri casinos or tribal casinos in Minnesota and Wisconsin, where smoking is permitted.

With a smoking ban, Ehrecke said Iowa casinos would see revenue drop 25 to 30 percent, and Iowa would see its tax revenue from casinos drop $60 million to $90 million a year from the current $300 million a year.

The proof, he said, is next door in Illinois, which instituted a smoking ban at its casinos on Jan. 1, 2008.

Tom Swoik, executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Association, said 2007 was the best year ever for Illinois' casino industry. In 2008, revenues plummeted 20.8 percent with the smoking ban in place, he said.

'Iowa, Missouri and Indiana still allow smoking, and we've lost customers to those states and they haven't come back,” Swoik said.

However, he said drawing conclusions from revenue numbers isn't always exact. The economy in Illinois, for instance, was struggling and has struggled since Illinois's smoking ban on casinos went into effect, he said.

Today, Swoik said Illinois casinos have more to worry about than a smoking ban. The big problem, he said, is the state's video gambling machines, which he said have populated the state with 19,000 video gambling terminals in bars, restaurants and even strip mall store fronts.

'Everybody's revenue is down the last couple of years because of video gambling,” Swoik said.

Iowa Gaming Association's Ehrecke said Iowa casinos along the Illinois border are feeling the pinch of Illinois' video gambling, too.

Gary Streit, Cedar Rapids attorney and longtime member of the American Cancer Society, said he doesn't buy the casino industry numbers.

Streit said there is 'no good study” that shows conclusively what happens to business when casinos shift from smoking to non-smoking, which Colorado did in 2008 along with Illinois. Other forces always are at work, including the health of the economy and where new casinos are being built, he said.

'I just get frustrated because the casinos make a lot of money, ”Streit said. 'If they make 10 percent less because they lost a little business, I don't think they're going to the poor house.”