Health board to hear plan allowing some smoke shelters
The City-County Health Board will meet in a larger venue at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Commission Chambers at the Civic Center, to discuss a proposed regulation allowing casino smoke shelters under specific restrictions.
Brothers Doug and KC Palagi, who own casinos in Great Falls with smoke rooms, say they’re not satisfied with the proposal, which they think was too closely modeled on a Missoula ordinance. They said the proposed regulation does not provide for interior entry doors from casinos to smoke rooms that they say are needed to ensure “better safety, sanitation and security.”
But Kristin Page Nei, an American Cancer Society representative from Florence, has said the Montana Clean Indoor Air Act did not envision any casino smoke shelters and the Montana Supreme Court clearly ruled against them.
Fallout from the hot topic has been swirling around Great Falls for several months.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled in late February that the smoke shelters built at two Great Falls casinos violated Montana’s Clean Indoor Air Act because small vents on the sides weren’t sufficient to turn the four-walled rooms required for gambling machines into the partially open structures that might be allowed for smoking rooms.
In overturning a Great Falls district judge’s ruling, the high court also said the smoke structures are part of the workplace, even if they’re not open to the non-smoking public, and therefore violate the clean air act.
Three views were expressed at a lively board health board listening session in late April:
Nei urged the board to follow the Clean Air Act and Montana Supreme Court ruling to ban casino smoke rooms with connecting, interior doors to casinos in order to minimize health risks of secondhand smoke to employees and other customers.
Owners and employees of casinos with such interior-entry smoke rooms — and a couple casino owners without such smoke rooms — said they should be allowed to continue operating them, possibly with further modification, because they can be controlled better than smoke rooms with entry from the outside only that are subject to urinating, vomiting and illegal drug use by vagrants.
Owners of two other casinos opposed the interior-entry smoke rooms, saying they violated the spirit of an early agreement and gave those casino owners an unfair advantage. One casino owner said his outdoor entry smoke room has worked fine.
The Palagis said Friday that they tried exterior entry ways to their casino smoke rooms initially, but they didn’t work because teens and vagrants littered, used illegal drugs and urinated and defecated in them.
They said they’ve removed the gambling machines from the smoke shelters since the Montana Supreme Court ruling but continue to allow customers to enter the smoke rooms from interior doors to smoke.
Requiring exterior entries would not work because much of the earlier troubles came during the casinos long operating hours, KC Palagi said.
“Requiring exterior doors be be kept unlocked during operating hours doesn’t resolve the concerns of our customers or take away our liability if someone gets robbed or stabbed in the smoking rooms,” he said. “Without interior entry doors we can’t control who enters those smoking rooms.”
Details of smoking room proposal
The Great Falls City-County Health Board will meet at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday in the Commission Chambers of the Civic Center, 2 Park Drive South.
They will discuss a proposed regulation involving smoke rooms in casinos that:
•Recognizes provisions of the Montana Clean Indoor Air Act that prohibit smoking in public places and places.
•Notes the controversy within Cascade County both before and after the Montana Supreme Court ruling over what types of casino smoke rooms are allowed, and says there is a “compelling need for clarification.”
•Allows a standalone smoke shelter not attached to another building that has a door than can be locked during non-operating hours but must remain open during regular casino hours.
•Also allows a shelter attached to a casino but only if its door can be entered from the outside rather than the casino. That door also must be unlocked during casino operating hours.
•Requires that both types of smoke shelters have at least 20 percent of their vertical space apart from the entryway open to outside air, with no smoke drifting into the casino.