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Tennessee: Bill would exclude churches from 'no smoking' signs law

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

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Mike Bell

Every church in Tennessee without a “no smoking” sign at each outside entrance is in violation of state law. But don’t look for pastors and church officials to be dragged off to jail.

The state departments of health and labor and workforce development never have enforced the 2007 law at churches and apparently won’t now that an amendment to exempt them from it has been sent to Gov. Phil Bredesen for his signature.

“It’s just common sense,” said Rep. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, who authored the amendment in the Tennessee House this year after agreeing not to push it last summer and spoil the state’s bipartisan Non-Smokers Protection Act when it was about to pass.

The House passed the amendment 97-0, last week. It passed the Senate earlier this year, where it was sponsored by Sen. Dewayne Bunch, R-Cleveland.

Just before the Non-Smokers Protection Act was to pass last summer, someone mentioned to Rep. Bell that churches apparently met the definition of a public place where no-smoking signs had to be posted, he said.

A number of pastors in Rep. Bell’s largely rural district told him that “no smoking” signs would have ruined the aesthetics of their churches, many of which have “beautiful, old, wooden front doors or vestibules or entranceways,” he said.

Rep. Bell said he went to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Stratton Bone, D-Lebanon, last year and told him the law would require signs on every entrance to every church building. He said Rep. Bone told him he didn’t realize that, but he agreed to help Rep. Bell pass the amendment in the 2008 General Assembly if he agreed not to bring it up then and wreck the pending bill.

The Rev. R. Michael Hubble, senior pastor of Keith Memorial United Methodist Church in Athens, said he had not heard of the sign mandate until a staff member mentioned it last week. He also did not know of the bill that makes churches an exception to the rule, he said.

Because his church has a preschool and a mothers’ morning-out program, it already had “no smoking” signs around doors children enter, Mr. Hubble said.

“I don’t have any problem with the places being non-smoking,” he said. “I would hope people wouldn’t be smoking” around the doors of a church.

“But I had a little bit of a question about the government trying to tell the church what to do,” he said.

Lydia Lenker, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bredesen, said the bill has not been transmitted to the governor’s office.

“Until we get to review it,” she said, “the governor doesn’t like to weigh in on it.”

Rep. Bell said he doesn’t see any reason Gov. Bredesen wouldn’t sign it.

As of Oct. 1, 2007, every church in Tennessee that did not display a “no smoking” sign at every outside entrance was in violation of the law.

Margaret Smith, director of lung health programs/advocacy for the American Lung Association in Tennessee, sent out an e-mail last month warning that any changes in the smoke-free workplace law could lead to further exemptions or weakening it.

“We ask that you help us communicate our opposition to any legislation that threatens to weaken” the law,” the e-mail said.

Now that the amendment has passed both Houses, Ms. Smith isn’t too upset.

“We did not want to take a chance on doing anything that would interfere with the integrity of the bill,” she said. “It might have opened the door for other bills, but that has not happened.”

Rep. Bell said that, before he introduced the bill, he made sure it would not become a vehicle to change the smoke-free law.

Any churches charged with violating the law would have been subject to a written violation for failing to comply with the requirements once in a 12-month period, to a penalty of $100 for a second violation in the period and to a fine of $500 for a third or subsequent violation during the time.

Sen Bunch said churches “don’t need some bureaucrat to come in and hammer them. That’s the last thing we needed.”

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