Mayor Rick Gray

 

1 of 1

The six-member legislative conference committee charged with drawing up a bill that the state House and Senate would approve is scheduled to meet twice next week.

It's not clear where things stand with the issue that scuttled compromise legislation two weeks ago — whether local municipalities should be permitted to enact stiffer prohibitions than whatever the state law might turn out to be.

Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray thinks they should.

"If the people at the state level don't have it together and they just want to do some innocuous type of ban, absolutely, the local municipalities should have the right to up the standard," Gray said Tuesday.

Gray has support among other Lancaster County chief executives, including Columbia Mayor Leo Lutz, Mount Joy Mayor Mary Ginder and Lititz Mayor Russell Pettyjohn.

"I believe it's our responsibility to do whatever we have to do to enact laws and ordinances to ensure the health and safety and welfare of the people we represent," Lutz said. "If the federal and state government does not enact laws that local officials feel fulfill that requirement, the local officials should enact stiffer laws."

Ginder, who is a nurse practitioner, agreed.

Pettyjohn said if boroughs, townships and cities are not permitted to enact their own ordinances, then "We're no longer a commonwealth."

Despite all the talk about local control over how tough to make a smoking prohibition, Republican state Rep. Bryan Cutler says he doesn't want a patchwork system in Pennsylvania with different municipalities with different rules.

"You could go down to Philly and not know what you can do and could inadvertently break the law," said Cutler, a member of the state House Health & Human Services Committee.

"If smoking's bad, then let's have a ban," Cutler added. "But let's not say some should have it and some shouldn't. My biggest concern is — are we picking winners and losers?"

Pennsylvania remains without a smoking ban even though five of the six bordering states — Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Ohio — have them, with some exemptions, such as casinos. West Virginia does not.

"It defines Pennsylvania as in the backwater," Gray said. "Smoking, if you look at the old (Humphrey) Bogart movies, was really in vogue. It's gone out of vogue."

The state House and Senate each passed bills banning smoking in public places, but there were differences involving exemptions, so the bills had to go to a conference committee.

The issue of whether to allow local municipalities to enact stiffer prohibitions than what comes out of the conference committee scuttled a potential compromise bill May 12 when Gov. Ed Rendell threatened to veto it.

The conference committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

Messages left with state Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, the Montgomery County Republican who authored the compromise bill earlier this month, and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Bob Mellow were not returned Tuesday.

Both are members of the conference committee.

E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com