Bullseye Saloon, ElkoNewMarket, MN To the Citizens of Minnesota and their elected state officials:

Bullseye Saloon, ElkoNewMarket, MN
To the Citizens of Minnesota and their elected state officials:
My name is Robert Ripley and I own a bar called Bullseye Saloon located about 25 miles straight South of the Twin Cities. Like many bar and restaurant owners in the state of MN, I have endured financial hardship since the unconstitutional smoking ban went into effect. My sales are down approximately 28%, I have been forced to cut employees’ hours, and I have not been able to take a paycheck in several months. This smoking ban is hurting me, my 13 employees, and also my customers because I have been forced to raise prices to try and break even. This ban hurts EVERYONE in the state of MN because the government is going to raise taxes elsewhere on all of us to make up for the lost tax revenue from liquor and tobacco sales.
I am a small rural bar that serves very limited food (pizzas, appetizers), and I can honestly say that over 60% of my customers smoke. I own the kind of bar that is really hit hard by this communist-like legislation. I have been doing everything in my power to keep all of my staff employed, but it had gotten very difficult lately so I started holding “theatre night” from 8:00am to 2:00am (close) 7 days per week. I am watching sales slowly coming back and I plan to keep taking advantage of the exemption that our state legislators built into the smoking ban laws. These legislators created an exception for actors to be able to smoke, and now they have to live with the law THEY wrote.
Not only is lost revenue an issue, but so is patron safety. I have found that before we started doing “theatre nights,” my customers were smoking in my bathrooms rather than going outside to smoke. When it is below zero outside, the smokers will find a place to smoke inside; the only place that I cannot legally monitor, the bathrooms. The problem is that they would leave their cigarette butts in my trash container on top of paper products thus creating a serious fire hazard. The Farmington Legion, about 10 miles East of my bar, had a huge fire last month because a customer was throwing butts down their cold air return vents to conceal their smoking. They will be shut down for 3-6 months rebuilding their bar, and losing revenue as an indirect result of the smoking ban. I wonder if the state legislators thought about risks like these when they were so gallantly trying to protect us.
In my opinion, this is not about smoking or not smoking, but about our liberty. Why is it that non-smoker’s rights to have a smoke-free bar seem to trump smoker’s rights to smoke in a bar? I thought that all people got “EQUAL” protection under the law. When did it change, in this free-market capitalistic country, that the government can tell us how long to live and how healthy to be? As American adults, we have the right to choose to smoke, to eat fast food, and to sit on the couch and watch TV if we want to. We have the right to breathe second-hand smoke if we so choose. If we let the MN legislators “protect our health” by eliminating the risk of second-hand smoke, then why not let them ban fast food, red meat, salt, and driving sports cars next? Who really has the power to tell us how healthy to be? And how healthy is “healthy enough” anyway? You will not find the “right to determine how healthy someone needs to be” anywhere in the MN state or federal constitutions. This is one slippery slope that us sons and daughters of liberty do not want to slide down.