Like their talks with the ARHA, coalition-building with organizations that had previously not allied with smoke free policy would later give Smoke-Free Arizona political credibility. ALBA had lobbied the ARHA to endorse Proposition 206.ARHA polled its members and found that they favored Proposition 201 over Proposition 206; in part, this was due to fear of some restaurant owners that Proposition 206 would drive restaurants’ smoking customers to bars. Restaurateurs believed the smoke free ordinance in Tempe had caused smokers to migrate to Phoenix and Scottsdale. According to a Scottsdale Tribune article, the ARHA “expressed concerns that Proposition 206 would favor restaurateurs who could afford to build expensive bar additions,” costing restaurants more to compete with other restaurants trying to skirt the no-smoking restaurants provision by offering sealed-off restaurant-bar smoking sections.The ARHA members, which only two years before had opposed a similar measure in the Legislature, when faced with the restaurants-only ban Proposition 206 proposed, supported Proposition 201 because it did not give a smoking “advantage” to bars. Campaign Chair Bill Pfeifer called the endorsement “significant”136 because ARHA’s support gave the Proposition 201 campaign the political proof they needed to refute Proposition 206’s campaign claim that Proposition 206 had a monopoly on political support from small businesses. Gov. Napolitano and the ARHA’s politically powerful endorsements gave the Smoke-Free Arizona campaign enough political traction to counter Proposition 206’s claim that Proposition 201 was anti-business.About the same time that the Committee to Oppose Smoke-Free Arizona was created,commercial indoor growing table a separate grassroots pro-tobacco group filed an initiative with the Secretary of State on December 20, 2005 and registered as a political committee.

Mostly orchestrated by cigar shops and tobacconists, this second opposition group called itself the “Keep Arizona Free Initiative.” Keep Arizona Free accrued $6,500 in contributions, which it had spent by June 5, 2006, on the Arizona Cigar Lobby, an organization run by Eric Ulis, cigar store owner and chair of the Keep Arizona Free Initiative.This committee’s proposed initiative did not oppose Smoke-Free Arizona, but instead posited its own weak smoking law – much weaker than RJ Reynolds’ eventual counter-initiative – that would have rolled back smoke free areas to only elevators, sections of health facilities, libraries, indoor theaters, halls, and buses.260 All other places would merely require signage indicating whether smoking was allowed or not, and would have required that all employers that allow smoking inform their employees “upon their application for employment, that smoking is permitted within the establishment.”The Keep Arizona Free Initiative never made it off the ground, and there is no evidence of coordination between Keep Arizona Free and ALBA’s Committee to Oppose Smoke-Free Arizona. ALBA President Bill Weigele later reported that, “in April 2006, ALBA [and its Committee to Oppose Smoke-Free Arizona] was asked by the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company if we were interested in attempting to place a competing initiative on the ballot.”RJ Reynolds told ALBA that its polling showed that, unlike the past, when tobacco company involvement would have been detrimental to a campaign, voters had become so jaded that they expected corporations to be major political players, so that the involvement of a tobacco company did not have the same negative consequences it once did.Furthermore, as disclosed during a July RJ Reynolds Shareholders Teleconference, RJ Reynolds informed the Arizona pro-smoking groups that RJ Reynolds was prepared to spend around $8 million in Arizona to combat the Smoke-Free Arizona initiative.ALBA was set to just run an opposition campaign against Proposition 201 with its limited finances and without direct tobacco industry involvement.

Various members of ALBA, who had worked previously to shut down Tempe and Prescott’s smoke free initiatives on their own, had felt that the taint of tobacco money was not worth the trade-off of the moral high ground.Dr. Lee Fairbanks, who had wrestled with ALBA previously, had been told by ALBA representatives that they would never accept tobacco company contributions.Fairbanks received a call in May 2006 from Bill Weigele, president of ALBA, informing Fairbanks that ALBA board members had voted to work with RJ Reynolds – and their money – to launch the Non-Smokers’ Protection Act.194 In the Tempe and Prescott opposition campaigns, ALBA and associates purportedly did not take tobacco funds, and actually attempted to sue Tempe for Smoke-Free Workplaces for insinuating they had done so.The earlier pro-smoking campaigns against these local ordinances did, however, employ the tobacco industry’s lawyer for Proposition 206, Lisa Hauser,who had been Gov. Symington’s lawyer present at the September 9, 1996 meeting with the tobacco industry to win Symington’s opposition to the state’s lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The “Non-Smoker’s Protection Act,” was registered with the Arizona Secretary of State on May 24, 2006, nine months after Proposition 201 had filed, after ALBA agreed to abandon their campaign and join RJ Reynolds as a co-sponsor of what would become Proposition 206.ALBA’s Weigele later explained in the ALBA Reporter, the organization’s quarterly newsletter, that RJ Reynolds “would opt out bars and the bar area in restaurants from their smoking ban” if ALBA agreed to provide their organization’s name and spokespeople for the initiative.Rather than a committee opposing Proposition 201, ALBA now was part of an anti-smoking law prohibiting smoking in most workplaces and the non-bar sections of restaurants . Mark Anthony DeSimone, member of ALBA Board of Directors, Chaired the Proposition 206 campaign committee, with Fred Malliare as Treasurer. ALBA terminated its Committee to Oppose Smoke-Free Arizona on July 14, 2006.The tobacco industry had been exploring a statewide preemptive initiative in Arizona since at least 2000 to combat local smoke free ordinances where the tobacco industry had less success.However, internal Philip Morris emails regarding Arizona indicate that “the [tobacco] companies elected not to go forward with an initiative [at that time] based on a follow up poll that did not achieve the 60% baseline support said to be necessary for a statewide initiative.”

In response to the industry’s failure to stop the continuing passage of local ordinances,199 in 2001 the industry seriously considered a statewide preemptive smoking regulation initiative. They were prepared to make concessions to public health to gain votes, proposing similar specifications to what RJ Reynolds would include in 2006’s Proposition 206. Dillard wrote to Philip Morris Government Affairs managers Pam Inmann and Ted Lattanzio that as part of the initiative voters would “be asked to choose between the status quo and our [sic] wonderful proposal which would totally protect non-smokers from ETS [environmental tobacco smoke, what the tobacco industry calls secondhand smoke] but – at the same time – permit hospitality establishment owners to exercise their property rights by offering separately ventilated accommodations to smokers as well.”199 RJ Reynolds filed its petition signatures for the “Non-Smoker Protection Act” on July 6, 2006, 15 days after Smoke-Free Arizona filed its signatures for Proposition 201, with more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The Yes on 206 Campaign gathered over 200,000 signatures in the shortest time of any initiative in Arizona’s history to put Proposition 206 on the ballot,paying signature gatherers sometimes $4-$8 per signature, unheard of amounts for Arizona.The Non-Smoker Protection Act included many provisions similar to the Smoke-Free Arizona Act , and portrayed itself as even more protective than Smoke-Free Arizona in preventing children’s exposure to smoke. Proposition 206 would have ended smoking in restaurants and workplaces, but not bars. Bar sections of larger establishments, such as restaurants, hotels, pool halls, and race tracks,commercial marijuana grow tables could allow smoking if completely sealed off and separately ventilated from the restaurant portion. Proposition 206 would also have prohibited children from entering bars and would prohibit children from entering veterans and fraternal clubs when smoking was present. RJ Reynolds’ answer to the universally accepted injunction against exposing children to tobacco smoke was not to outlaw the smoke, but outlaw the kids. Municipal and county ordinances restricting smoking in bars, the bar portions of restaurants, and tobacco shops would be preempted, and any local clean indoor air ordinance stricter in any aspect than Proposition 206 would be nullified. In short, the main effect of Proposition 206 would have been to protect smoking in bars, rolling back any preexisting ordinances prohibiting smoking in bars, and preventing any additional local smoking restrictions from occurring at the local level. Bars are one of the prime locations where the tobacco industry, especially RJ Reynolds, still markets its products under the MSA, and tobacco company-sponsored promotional events and advertising in bars is extremely important for the tobacco industry to sustain tobacco normalization.Furthermore, liquor associations and trade groups often represented tobacco industry interests in Arizona politics, and remaining tied with those industries shielded the tobacco industry. While RJ Reynolds spent almost $8.8 million to prohibit smoking in workplaces and restaurants, their long-term priority to entrench smoking in bars warranted the trade-off.

The criticism of Proposition 203 concentrated on the fact that it was a tax increase. Other claims included that cigarette taxes are regressive,no logical link exists between taxing smokers and paying for early childhood education , funding early childhood education with a tobacco tax is fiscally irresponsible, and the Legislature should be providing general funding sufficient for early childhood care and education.Finally, a criticism leveled at Proposition 203 stated that if tobacco consumption goes down, then funding for the First Things First program and other programs funded by preexisting tobacco excise taxes will also decrease, causing First Things First to ask the Legislature to appropriate more funds for the new program.The brother of the president of the Arizona Tax Research Association 28 wrote a letter to the editor stating that Proposition 203 was “just another ’feel good’ proposition that furtively increases taxes and further burdens the poorer sections of our society.” The pattern for the 2006 election cycle in Arizona, as in Nevada, Ohio, Missouri, and California, was that Phillip Morris focused primarily on fighting tobacco taxes and RJ Reynolds focused primarily on fighting clean indoor air acts. Phillip Morris registered a committee to oppose Proposition 203 on October 12, 2006 a little over three weeks before the election, but did not provide major funding.Unlike RJ Reynolds’ Proposition 206 campaign that had ALBA run the campaign and spent millions, Philip Morris’ No on 203 campaign had its Chair and Treasurer from out of state , and only spent a little over $66,000 on the campaign . This money never translated into any sort of campaign. Despite the fact that a cigarette text increase would reduce smoking, the tobacco companies did not mount a campaign against Proposition 203, instead concentrating on fighting the clean indoor air law, Proposition 201. There was no coordination or collaboration between Propositions 203 and 201, in part because they were different measures with different purposes, and in part because the Proposition 203 campaign was playing down the fact that it was a tobacco tax and did not want Proposition 203 to be associated with tobacco control in fear that this would alienate voters. While an association with Proposition 203’s powerful endorsers might have benefitted Proposition 201, it posed a risk to Proposition 203 because of the tremendous RJ Reynolds media opposition to Proposition 201. Especially given that RJ Reynolds in the last month of campaigning honed in on the 2 cent tax aspect of Proposition 201, First Things First did not want to get caught in the crossfire. Lee Fairbanks commented that “ordinarily [Proposition 203] would have been a target” on the tobacco industry’s radar, but because of Proposition 201, fighting the 80 cent excise tax increase was eclipsed by the industry’s need to fight Smoke-Free Arizona.In a way, Proposition 201 acted as a “shield” for Proposition 203, as $8.8 million was spent fighting Proposition 201, while only a pittance was spent against Proposition 203, and that only at the end of the election. One significant problem that Proposition 203 created for tobacco control in Arizona was that there was no revenue backfill for TEPP and other programs to compensate for the fact that the tax increase would reduce cigarette consumption. This omission meant that when tobacco consumption decreased as a result of the tax increase, funding for Arizona’s tobacco control program from existing tobacco taxes would decline. Long-time TEPP employee Jean-Robert Jeoffroy commented in a 2006 interview that the First Things First “initiative is also very troubling because, Heart, Cancer, and Lung went to them asking for backfill and they refused to put it in.”Sharlene Bozack of ACS explained, “We went to them and said that ‘if they were going to do the 80 cent tax that they needed to do backfill’ and we explained the whole thing and Mrs. Basha said ‘not interested,’ that was her message to us.”Bozack revealed in a 2007 interview that ACS, ALA, and AHA did not support Proposition 203 because it would hurt TEPP.