A local bar owner is going to court to block the voter-approved smoking ban in St Joseph.
Steve Peterman is the owner of Peterman’s Shamrock on St Joseph Avenue. He’s challenging the ban and hopes a judge will block it from going into effect this June.
We spoke with Kansas City lawyer Jonathan Sternberg, who filed the lawsuit and a petition for an injunction to block the ordinance.
Sternberg says the Missouri Constitution has for over 125 years prohibited laws that create special priveleges for sub-classes unless they have a special relationship to the subject of those laws.
“The smoking ordinance bans smoking in all enclosed public places and enclosed workplaces in the City of St Joseph for the purpose of protecting public health,” Sternberg says. “Then, however, it suddenly goes and exempts casino gaming areas and their attached bars and restaurants inside the St Jo Frontier Casino.”
“Casinos have no more special relationship to smoking than my client’s bar does.”
Sternberg says the ordinance is more broad than others in the state. It may be the only smoking ban that doesn’t exempt tobacco shops. He says similar laws have been struck down across the state and across the country. Similar laws have been rejected in Louisville, Omaha, and Evansville, Indiana. And similar laws in Missouri have been rejected for the same reason.
“Just like all these other cities in the country where this has been struck down for the same reason, and just like in countless other previous Missouri cases striking down laws that did exactly the same thing, the smoking ban can’t exempt casinos an other enclosed places or enclosed workplaces.”
The City of St Joseph had not yet been served legal process on Sternberg’s lawsuit by Tuesday afternoon. Once they are served, Sternberg hopes to schedule a hearing before a judge, and he says that could happen within a matter of a couple of weeks.
The ordinance is scheduled to go into effect June 7.