 "Photo: Ben Sklar")
"It was a good run," Side Bar owner Trey Spaw said to a fellow bar owner at Elysium on Saturday night. With most precincts reporting, it was apparent the smoking ban had passed. "Forty years for you, 10 months for me."
Spaw and a handful of other Austin bar owners huddled at the corner of the bar, watching the silent returns from a public access station flash on a bar TV screen. At the election day headquarters of Keep Austin Free, a mixture of optimism, anxiety and then overwhelming disappointment filled the room instead of a live band or house music.
The will of Austin's health-conscious overcame the business interests of local bar and club owners Saturday with the passage of a citywide smoking ban.
Effective Sept. 1, the ban will force patrons of the 217 Austin bars and clubs that still allow smoking indoors to smoke at least 15 feet outside. Nursing homes and bingo parlors are exempt from the ban, which Onward Austin petitioned for in February.
Even though he has only owned Side Bar for less than a year, Spaw said he has been in the business his whole life - he started working in his mother's restaurant at age 16 and has spent his life waiting tables, managing restaurants and now owning his own bar.
Spaw said he would love to be wrong and hopes business increases, as Onward Austin has said it will.
"I would be thrilled to death," Spaw said. "I would still be in business, and we could go on living our lives until they pick something else to ban."
Onward Austin is an American Cancer Society-backed organization committed to reducing and eliminating smoking and tobacco products.
"I think [the smoking ban] will enhance the number of people who turn out to live clubs," said Onward Austin spokesman David Butts. "Change seems to be a very fortuitous event, but it'll be to their benefit in the long run."
Elysium owner John Wickham entered the Place 4 race against incumbent Betty Dunkerley at the last minute in an attempt to increase the proposed smoking ban's visibility. He came in last place with 6 percent of the vote. Wickham spent much of the evening seated at the bar, crunching turn-out numbers and fielding questions from the news media, who at times seemed to outnumber the bar's customers Saturday night.
"I fell in love with Austin, because it was a free and tolerant society," Wickham said. "I don't think Austin's going to be the same free and tolerant society anymore."
Wickham echoed many of the other owners' characterizations of what the smoking ban meant in the larger context - "gentrification," "Californication" and "Disneyfication."
"To give you an analogy for our open green spaces: You know all these rolling hills that everybody fell in love with, and yet everybody wants to build their house on the side of them," Wickham said. "What ends up happening is that they destroy the very thing that they love about the city."
Wickham said the ban passed because those who frequent bars and support live music do not traditionally vote.
"Were this vote kept to people who actually went out to bars and live music venues, I think we would have won handily," Wickham said.
Keep Austin Free may pursue legal action, said 219 West owner Paul Silver.
"It's just a matter of us getting together as a group and deciding how we're going to raise the money to take it to the next step," Silver said. "There are so many people who are at risk of failure that time is probably of the essence."
Scott Hankins, 28, sat and smoked at Elysium on Saturday night, watching the election's results come in from a table near the bar. Hankins said he comes to Elysium at least once a month when he's not working the tech support night shift. He said he heads to the bars at least five nights a week but that the smoking ban would change all that.
"I'm going to stop frequenting a lot of my favorite bars," Hankins said. "When I'm at a bar, part of what I do is smoke. It's silly, but it's one of the things I do."
Normally, Hankins would have slept in on a Saturday, but he woke up early to vote against the ban.
"I think that this is a real step forward for Austin to address a health issue and for people to begin to recognize that we can take action," Butts said. "We don't have to accept the status quo when it's not the healthy status quo."
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