Health advocate Stephanie Steinberg wants to bar smoking at Denver International Airport, where smokers have escaped a state ban most public places have against lighting up.
Steinberg worked on Colorado’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which gave DIA an exemption.
“We are trying to clean up the exemptions in the Colorado Clean Air Act. Whenever there is an exemption it means that somebody out there is breathing second-hand smoke,” Steinberg said Thursday.
The Greenwood Village resident plans to ask the Denver City Council, which has the power to toughen the law within its borders. If that doesn’t work, she said, she will go back to the state legislature.
Four lounges, where alcohol and/or food are served at the airport, allow smoking.
City Councilman Michael Hancock, whose district includes the airport, supported the original effort to ban smoking in public places, but he objects to removing the exemption for DIA.
In most buildings a smoker has the option of stepping outside for a smoke. But once a traveller goes through security to wait for a plane on one of the concourses they can’t easily go back outside, Hancock said.
“They should have somewhere to go so we instituted an exemption where those operators would implement a very expensive ventilation system. Environmentally we are satisfied,” Hancock said.
No ventilation system can eliminate the detrimental effect second-hand smoke has on employees and those who enter the lounges, Steinberg said.
Steinberg was recently involved in the successful drive to eliminate a similar exemption held by Colorado’s casinos.
Anti-smoking advocates and smokers will continue to wrangle over the issue for some time, said Pete Meersman, president of the Colorado Restaurant Association.
“What they passed a couple of years ago is going to continue to be tweaked probably every year for the foreseeable future.”
Tom McGhee: (303)954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
