In Louisiana, the metro council of East Baton Rouge Parish will take up the proposed ban on smoking in workplaces, which has been the subject of billboards, broadcast and other ads seeking support for smoke-free workplaces for months. Five of the council’s 12 members have sponsored the smoking ban which could result in a loss of million in annual casino revenue to the city-parish and million to the state, said Troy Stremming, a spokesman for Pinnacle Entertainment, owner of L’Auberge Hotel & Casino.
Stremming noted similar bans in New Orleans, Colorado and Illinois led to revenue decreases of around 20 percent. “Budgets are tough at the city level and the state level. A significant reduction like that, you have to find places where you’re going to cut to offset the reduction in the tax revenue,” he stated. In the last fiscal year, $9.8 million of the city-parish’s $830 million budget came from casinos and the state received more than $60 million from Baton Rouge casinos.
After New Orleans’s smoking ban took effect last April, winnings fell close to 30 percent at Harrah’s Casino New Orleans. However, according to Louisiana Gaming and Control Board figures, Harrah’s winnings fell by 10 percent in the 10 full months since the ban began.
Bronson Frick, associate director of Americans for Nonsmokers Rights, said other factors could be blamed, besides the smoking ban, for Harrah’s drop in revenue, including fewer conventions, bad and weather, regional competition and struggles in the oil and gas industry.
Frick noted there are more than 800 smoke-free casinos and other gambling venues in 21 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands ban smoking in casinos, he said. More than 83 percent of the U.S. adult population does not smoke and they expect their workplace and entertainment venues to be smoke-free, he said.
Frick said a number of major casinos, with hundreds of millions invested, have realized that there are ways to accommodate smokers without harming other people.
Frick pointed out Harrah’s had 90 days to prepare for the smoking ban. But instead officials spent most of that time fighting the law rather than accommodating it, he said.
