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	Thursday, December 31, 1998 Smoking ban widely ignored a year later By JACQUELINE FOX, Times Staff Writer

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lendale--One year after Sacramento stamped out smoking in bars, the law, it seems, has become the village joke.
     Saddle up to the bar at the Gold Rail on Pacific Avenue in Glendale, and it doesn't take long to see where patrons and employees alike stand on the issue.
     "Why don't they just give up?" said Gold Rail regular Bill Easley. "I don't smoke, but when I come in here I expect two things: that I'm going to drink and somebody's gonna smoke."
     Gold Rail bartender Armando Delgado said the bar has never been cited for noncompliance, and, as far as he knows, has never received one complaint from a customer. That could be in part due to the two $14,000 air purifiers Gold Rail owner Andy Avial installed recently. "Probably the air you breath in here is more healthy than the air you breath outside," Delgado said.
     Lucy Robinson, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said her office has received only 34 complaints against Glendale establishments since January. Under the ban, fines of up to $500 can be imposed on bar owners by the city after a third complaint.
     News of bars not complying with the anti-smoking lawban comes as no surprise to members of the National Smokers Alliance, a nonprofit organization attempting to overturn the ban. Eric Shippers, one of the group's senior vice presidents, said Tuesday his staff inadvertently received a copy of one of two surveys conducted last Spring by the California Department of Health Services. The first survey, Shippers said, supported the health department's anti-smoking position. The second, however, tells a much different story.
     Analysis of the results Shippers' group received reveal that 61.8% of the owners, managers and employees of bar establishments across the state interviewed by the health department disapprove of the smoking ban. Even more telling are the results showing 27.9% of the survey respondents "openly acknowledge noncompliance in their own establishments." And noncompliance, the survey shows, rises to 52% for "stand-alone" bars.
     "For all practical purposes, we have already won," Shippers said. The survey has shown "that the very people they have wanted to protect have rejected the ban."
     But state health department spokesman Ken August said the National Smokers Alliance is a front group for the tobacco industry. He said the second survey shows responses only from bar owners, not patrons. In addition, August said, the first survey showed patrons overwhelmingly approved of the law, despite what bar owners had to say.
     "We learned that bar owners didn't like the law, and that didn't surprise us," August said, adding that the second survey showed 50% of the patrons interviewed supported the ban. By August, he said, that figure jumped to 65%
     Regardless, Shippers said, the second survey was not presented last June when health department representatives met with lawmakers in Sacramento for a lengthy hearing on the ban. But August said the survey was not presented because it was intended to be used only by his department as an educational tool for helping bar owners make the transition to a smoke-free workplace.