Great Falls casino owners split over smoke shacks

Finding agreement among Great Falls casino owners about smoke shacks seems about as easy as poker players drawing an inside straight.

Opinions on the issue are split and fiercely held.

Joe McKenney, owner of the Cart Wheel Casino and a former state legislator when the law that eventually would ban smoking in bars and other public buildings was approved, is somewhat neutral on the topic.

"I voted against the smoking ban when the Legislature approved it in 2005 because I felt it was a violation of personal property rights," said McKenney, who owned the Legends Sports Pub at the time.

"But the smoking ban was devastating to everybody in the bar and casino industry when it went into effect in October 2009, on the tails of the Great Recession," he said. "Many of my gambling customers smoke, and they cut their visits short if they came at all."

"And those healthy, blueberry-eating joggers who promised they would patronize bars if smoking were banned never came," McKenney added.

A couple of years later, a few casino owners felt they could construct special smoking rooms with slits in the walls for ventilation to allow smokers to continue playing gaming machines, he recalled. McKenney said he was sympathetic, but felt such smoking rooms violated the spirit of the law, and he did not build a smoke shack on the back of his Cart Wheel casino.

Tom Heisler Jr., owner of Classic 50s Casino and other Great Falls establishments with his family, has been a leading foe of the smoking shelters and was pleased with the Supreme Court's decision.

Heisler said the Montana Tavern Association negotiated a deal with health officials and lobbyists to give taverns a four-year grace period until 2009 to phase in the smoking ban "and most of us felt we should honor that agreement on principle."

Casino and tavern owners were all hard hit first by the Great Recession in 2008, and particularly by the smoking ban that drove many customers away when it was implemented in the fall of 2009, which also happened to be particularly cold and snowy, he said.

Heisler said he and other veteran tavern owners objected when a few started putting in smoking rooms in 2011, feeling they were going back on the industry's 2005 promise.

In addition, he said, they felt it gave those casinos an unfair advantage because not every casino had the room to add on a smoking room or wanted to go the added expense because they'd have to upgrade other parts of their building, such as heating, air conditioning and bathrooms.

"With the court ruling, we'll all be on a level playing field again," Heisler said.

But brothers Doug and K.C. Palagi and their business partner Gregg Smith said they weren't trying to get around the law or get an edge on their competitors when they first started toying with smoking shelters in 2011.

Rather, Smith said, they were "trying to keep our smoking customers out of the elements." They started with three-walled shelters that the gamblers accessed from the outside of the casinos when they wanted a smoking break.

But those didn't turn out to be either safe or sanitary, Doug Palagi said, because vagrants smoked pot and urinated in them and high school kids combed them looking for left over cigarettes.

Gradually the partners changed and added to the smoke shelters, eventually ending up with furnished, four-walled rooms with gambling machines and TVs adjoining the casinos with internal entrances from the casino and one-way fire exits. They also featured good air exchange systems.

The partners thought they'd found a compromise between laws governing gambling and clean air by placing ventilating slits in a wall to give the room access to outside air, but the Supreme Court ruled that was "the functional equivalent to cracking a window" and did not turn a walled and furnished enclosed room into the required partially open structure.