The executives leading the IX Atlantic City casinos have seemingly won over enough New Jersey lawmakers in their seeking to maintain tobacco smoking on their gaming floors.
Just a month agone the odds seemed serious that say lawmakers inwards Trenton would overhaul legislating to end the casinos’ indoor smoking loophole created through the New Jersey Smokefree Air Act of 2006. Two indistinguishable pieces of legislation — Senate Bill 264 and Assembly Bill 2151 — mustered sufficiency sustenance by way of cosponsors to passport the statutes.
Sen. Joe Vitale (D-Middlesex), who authored S264 and leads the Senate Health, Human Services, and Senior Citizens Committee where the government note was allocated for initial review, says he no longer has the votes needed to frontward the statute to the good Senate floor.
“We’ll get on that point eventually,” Vitale said this week. “This will pass, and we’ll get hold of it upward in a new session with young members.”
Vitale reportedly lost consensus on the casino smoking proposal after the gaming industry warned that such a regulatory vary would assign their businesses at a competitive disfavor with casinos inward nearby Philadelphia where casinos tin can take into account indoor tobacco plant use. The casinos contrive that a smoking censor mastered the shoring would Pb to thousands of job cuts.
Sen. Fred Madden (D-Gloucester) was ane Democratic who switched his support. He said that piece he respects putting people’s health first, he didn’t seek public office “to pop out taking people’s livelihoods away.”
Back to Drawing Board?
Atlantic City casino execs say they’re stock-still reeling from the pandemic. Despite increased brick-and-mortar gaming revenue — casino win upwardly 13% inwards October from the same month inward 2019 — the resorts say higher smash costs are deep knifelike into those revenue gains.
The casinos are asking commonwealth lawmakers to render them clip to conceptualize ideas to live up to both parties of the smoking dilemma. The manufacture says that mightiness include to the full enclosed gaming rooms where smoking would follow allowed and the surcease of smoking at tabular array games. Only employees willing to do work inwards the smoking chambers would bear on existence subjected to used smoke.
Sen. Vince Polistina (R-Atlantic) says it’s clip to rework the cassino smoking bills. Polistina, who represents Atlantic City and sits on the State Government Wagering, Tourism, and Historic Prevention Committee, believes in that respect are solutions other than a concluded smoking ban.
The casinos believe they can fit our end of eliminating employee and patron exposure to secondhand fume with a structured design and additional capital letter investment into their properties o'er the next couple of years,” Polistina said. “Given that their concerns nigh potency task deprivation and closures hold resonated with some lawmakers, this is the direction i believe we demand to go away so that we don’t turn a loss impulse on this issue.”
Current Law
Under New Jersey’s 2006 smoke-free air law, Atlantic City casinos canful denominate 25% of their gaming flooring for indoor smoking. The immunity applies only if to casinos that have at lower limit 150 standalone expansion slot machines, 10 tabular array games, or some compounding of the two, as approved by the tell Casino Control Commission.
There are no more airing requirements or distancing rules well-nigh the blank space separating the supposedly smoke-free sections from the smoking parts.