The residents at the Bethel, a nine-unit condo in City Park West, like to open the windows of their apartments and let in the summer air.
Or they used to enjoy it.
Now, they say, their lungs — and furn ishings — are being assaulted by second-hand smoke wafting from cigarettes, largely chugged on by employees from St. Joseph’s Hospital across the street.
“Over time, it’s just become the smoking area,” said Gail Lily, a resident in the building. “The smoking isn’t so much the problem as the amount of it — and the litter. Now it’s like a public-health issue.”
Lily’s neighborhood is just one of a number throughout the city forced to deal with some of the unintended consequences of Denver’s public smoking ban.
Initially passed in 2006, the law prohibits smoking within 15 feet of any public building. A little more than three years ago, the City Council passed the Smoke-Free Hospital Ordinance, prohibiting smoking on city property surrounding hospitals and buildings owned or leased by hospitals.
District 6 City Councilman Charlie Brown opposed the ordinance, predicting that it would become less a hospital concern than “an adjacent neighborhood issue.”
“I never liked the law, I never saw a need for it,” Brown said. “If I lived there, I’d be furious.”
Some hospitals have dealt with the ban by setting up designated smoking areas in isolated, outdoor areas, like loading docks.
However, St. Joseph’s considers itself a completely nonsmoking campus, which means that anyone wishing to smoke — employees, patients, even family members who are visiting patients — have to leave the immediate area to do so.
More often than not, Lily said, they’re finding their way to her property. The Bethel also sits next to a bagel shop, which means that customers who want to light up also find themselves gravitating toward the building.
“There are groups of patients that come over,” Lily says. “Initially you don’t notice, but then there are 15 people, or there are six or seven or eight several times a day.”
The unofficial spokesperson for her building, Lily has been relentless in attacking the problem. There have been daily calls to her councilman, Albus Brooks, as well as to the district manager of the bagel chain.
St. Joseph’s is on speed dial.
Lily was eventually connected with Brad Ludsord, the hospital’s vice president of finance, who admits that something needs to be done.
“I just kept thinking that if I were in her home and people were congregating on my fence line and property line and smoking and littering, that would not feel good to me,” Ludsord said. “We’re a hospital, we’re about healing. Being smoke-free feels like a core value that should be there for us. But there are people who work for us who smoke — we’ve struggled with this, being a smoke-free campus and a good neighbor to our community.”
The smoking employees feel like they’re in a bind as well.
Although there is not a campuswide policy regarding smoking, some managers have implemented their own regulations. Which means that while some workers can duck out for a cup of coffee, smokers have to clock out before they can go out for a puff. There is a bus stop that sits just outside the hospital; some employees have smoked there, others have been shooed away.
“Sometimes there are guards watching us,” a woman who wanted to be identified only as Karen said as she took a break, while sitting on a window sill of the building across the street from Lily’s. “There are just so many rules; we can’t walk around the building, if we sit at the bus stop they run us away because St. Joe’s thinks it’s theirs. But you look up and there are patients hanging on to their IV poles coming out to smoke.”
And, often times, making their way to the Bethel.
“There are just too many people,” Lily says. “They’re not smoking as they’re walking by or going to their cars. This is where they smoke — it’s just become a habit.”
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
