ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) -- With their push to end smoking in Atlantic City's casinos going nowhere fast in either the courts or the state Legislature, casino workers and supporters of smoke-free gambling halls demonstrated Thursday outside a hotel where New Jersey's governor was due to speak.
The workers have been pushing for four years to end an exemption in New Jersey's clean air law that allows smoking inside the nine casinos. They say they or their co-workers are becoming ill with cancer, heart disease and other conditions related to exposure to second-hand smoke.
Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has said he will sign a bill to end casino smoking once it reaches his desk. But he has invested little political capital in pushing for it to happen.
His office referred a reporter to a statement he made in a call-in show in September on News 12 New Jersey in which the governor questioned why workers are blaming him for the impasse.
"I have an enormous amount of sympathy with them; they're somehow blaming this on me," Murphy said on the show. "I just want to repeat what I have been saying for about five years: If a bill comes to my desk that bans smoking in casinos in Atlantic City, I will sign it. Period. I am not equivocating, and I have not equivocated about that. The way to solve this is through legislation."
A bill to end casino smoking has been stalled in the state Legislature for years without the state's Democratic leadership allowing it to progress to full votes in the Senate and Assembly.
And a lawsuit brought by the worker s in April is working its way slowly through the legal system; a judge refused to grant an order in August that would have ended smoking in the gambling halls.
The stalemate added to the frustration of casino workers who say they want the same workplace protections that virtually every other worker in New Jersey receives.
"It's horrible when you have three, four, five people blowing smoke in your face," said Sandy Smolen, a dealer at the Borgata casino for the past five years and a 40-year veteran of the industry. "You can't get away from it. You go home with a cough you didn't have that morning."
Elaine Rose, a frequent casino patron, voiced similar sentiments.
"As a player, I've walked into a casino, played a couple hours, and walked out with a bad case of bronchitis," she said.
Whether to ban smoking is one of the most controversial issues not only in Atlantic City casinos, but in other states where workers have expressed concern about secondhand smoke. They are waging similar campaigns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Virginia.
The Atlantic City casino industry opposes a ban, fearing the loss of significant revenue and jobs if smokers stop coming to Atlantic City and take their business elsewhere.
But opponents say casinos in several parts of the country have successfully gone smoke-free without losing business.
A competing bill that would keep the current 25% limit of the casino floor on which smoking can occur, but impose other limits is also bottled up in the Legislature.
That measure would allow smoking in unenclosed areas of the casino floor that contain slot machines and are designated as smoking areas that are more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) away from table games staffed by live dealers. It also would allow the casinos to offer smoking in enclosed, separately ventilated smoking rooms with the proviso that no worker can be assigned to work in such a room against their will.
Ricky Foster, a supervisor-dealer at the Borgata for 21 years, said the frustration among workers is palpable.
"We're tired of doing Go Fund Me accounts for people's cancer and heart conditions, and they never smoked a day in their life," he said.
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