ACTA director Andrew Ortiz commented in a 2007 interview that, until 2004 when the statewide coalition developed for the Smoke-Free Arizona initiative, “we were working piecemeal, city-bycity, sometimes working with county governments, so it was much easier for the opponents to stay collectively arrayed against us.”Without a state-level approach to enacting clean indoor air in Arizona , ACTA’s expertise and resources could only reach those communities already primed to pass an ordinance . Nonetheless, ACTA’s role as a catalyst and technical support resource was crucial to the success of many of the local smoke free ordinances from 2001 through 2004. The small city of Surprise passed a smoke free ordinance through the City Council, 5-2 on January 10, 2002. It went into effect February 10 and prevented smoking “in any enclosed place where the public gathers,” including restaurants, businesses and government buildings. It excluded freestanding bars, smoke shops, 25 percent of all motel rooms, and outdoor areas as long as smoke does not enter buildings.First time violators were fined $100. Surprise became the first city in the West Valley of the metropolitan Phoenix area to end smoking in restaurants and workplaces, and helped spark Goodyear and other cities to act similarly. A grassroots group of Surprise citizens affiliated with ACAS first raised the issue when it filed a petition with signatures to put a smoke free city ordinance proposal on the March 2003 ballot, but the City Council, not wanting to wait a year for the election,plastic grow table decided to address the issue through the Council. A December 2000 poll by O’Neil Associates Inc. conducted for ACAS and ACTA had previously found 74% of Surprise voters favored smoke free enclosed public spaces.

The importance of Surprise’s ordinance lies in its timing because it happened just as the whole metropolitan Phoenix area attempted to negotiate a region wide smoke free law, including input from the Maricopa County Board of Health. Surprise’s City Council’s leadership inspired tobacco control advocates to take the lead and create smoke free ordinances throughout Maricopa County. In the East Valley , the town of Gilbert passed a clean indoor air ordinance on May 1, 2001 based on Mesa’s weakened 1996 ordinance that included workplaces, restaurants, bowling alleys and bingo halls, but excluded bars and restaurant bars and allowed for an exemption for restaurants “anticipating” a loss in revenues. Enforcement began November 12, 2001. Adopted unanimously by the Gilbert City Council, the ordinance was a product of Mayor Cynthia Dunham’s efforts in bringing the city, health groups, and local chambers of commerce to the table.Gilbert became the testing grounds for the “model ordinance” drafted by Jessica Pope, Government Relations Director of the Southwest Region of the American Heart Association and Eric Emmert of the East Valley Chamber of Commerce whom were working together to develop a region-wide smoke free law designed to be a model for all cities in the East Valley, including Chandler, Tempe, and Scottsdale. As a result of political compromises with Eric Emmert of the East Valley Chamber of Commerce, however, Gilbert’s “model ordinance” contained compromises particular to the politics of passing the ordinance in Gilbert that would have been passed down to other cities, including the “opt out” provision of anticipated hardship.Pope explained her reticence to include smoke free bars in Gilbert and the model ordinance for the East Valley on March 30, 2001, when she told the Southwest Valley Tribune, “We feel we should write an ordinance that reflects what the public wants. I understand where Dr. Fairbanks is coming from [in wanting to include bars as a health rather than a political issue] and I agree with him, but Arizona is not ready for smoke-free bars.

In time, I think Arizona will get there, but we’re not there yet.”While Pope and Emmert sought a region wide smoke free ordinance excluding bars, Fairbanks, who had disagreed with this exemption, actively resisted the AHA’s exemption-laden smoking ordinance proposal. Gilbert’s smoke free ordinance was not progressive for its time. The Gilbert ordinance allowed for hardship exemptions in restaurants showing 15% or greater loss in revenue compared to the previous year and allowed for separately sealed-off and ventilated smoking rooms for bar sections of restaurants. In addition to allowing hardship exemptions, the ordinance also allowed for anticipated hardship exemptions, that is, it permitted exemptions from the smoke free ordinance before evidence of economic harm occurred and prior to enforcement of the ordinance.At the time of the ordinance’s implementation in October 2001,seven restaurants were granted exemptions. Former Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights staffer Tim Filler suggested in a 2007 interview that because the health voluntaries’ push for the clean indoor air ordinances was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant which they hoped to renew, there may have been pressure on the health voluntaries to go for quantity rather than quality in passing smoke free ordinances.204Several attempts at regional tobacco control existed prior to the 2006 statewide effort. Most notably, from September to December 2001 Phoenix area chambers of commerce and voluntary health associations entertained collaboration on a Greater Phoenix Area East Valley clean indoor air ordinance which would have provided uniform standards across the region. While the proposed clean air ordinance would have been a slight improvement on existing smoking policies – at the time most cities in the area only addressed municipal buildings and non-smoking sections in restaurant – the compromise ordinance was substantially weaker than Arizona’s benchmark ordinance at the time, the 1996 Mesa ordinance, which mandated smoke free restaurants and restaurant bars but exempted stand-alone bars with class-6 liquor licenses.

Instead of surpassing the weakened Mesa ordinance, the East Valley regional smoking ordinance would have ended smoking in restaurants in Gilbert, Scottsdale, Chandler, and Tempe, while not addressing bars or the bar portions of restaurants. During the stalled negotiations for the regional smoking ordinance, ACAS President Lee Fairbanks realized a region-wide smoke free ordinance including bars was not likely to materialize through the current chambers of commerce-health voluntary negotiations, so he started working on a petition for the Smoke-Free Tempe initiative, which would become the most comprehensive clean air ordinance in Arizona. Because the business-health coalition was attempting to hammer out a regional clean indoor air policy for the entire Phoenix Metropolitan region, both sides were willing to accept certain compromises. Restaurants would be smoke free, a stricter standard than the nonsmoking sections most of cities involved had on the books. But the catch to the region-wide agreement, however, was a caveat to only implement the law if Phoenix also passed the same ordinance. The main flaw of this policy was that the “model ordinance” the voluntaries and the East Valley Chamber of Commerce initially agreed upon included a hardship exemption for anticipated hardship, not proven hardship.The health voluntaries came to the table to negotiate with the business community from an already compromised position, leaving the East Valley ordinance a model only for protobacco interests. The major gap in Arizona’s local tobacco control has perpetually been Phoenix. In response to the discussion regarding a region-wide East Valley and Phoenix no-smoking ordinance proposed by Eric Emmert of the East Valley Chamber of Commerce together with the health voluntary organizations, Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza shrugged off the idea of Phoenix joining the plan, responding to reporters in a 2002 interview, “I know other cities are struggling with this [smoking ordinance] issue, but it has not hit our radar screen at all.”By 2004, however, the Phoenix Environmental Quality Commission, a standing Phoenix City Council-appointed board of 15 volunteers,rolling bench grow tables examined smoke free ordinance options for Phoenix, and asked the Phoenix City Council to support policy implementing a regional or statewide smoke free law covering at least workplaces and restaurants.The Commission’s recommendation, along with the East Valley chambers of commerce and the health voluntaries’ pressure to join in the region-wide smoking ordinance was not successful. Realizing that their capital city leaders did not have the political will to adopt a smoke free ordinance, and Arizona’s state Legislature would not pass a smoke free law, the statewide smoke free initiative campaign organizers viewed a statewide campaign as primarily benefitting Phoenix by providing it with smoke free coverage when government leadership was reticent to act. Despite the existence of organizations such as Smoke-free Phoenix and the AHA, ALA, ACS, and ACAS working between 2001 and 2005 to influence Phoenix city smoke free policy, Phoenix stood stubbornly with its 1988 policy that allowed smoking virtually in all public places including workplaces, as long as the establishment was accompanied by proper signage, the tobacco industry’s “accommodation” solution.

Phoenix’s refusal to address the smoking issue inhibited other cities in the greater Phoenix region from acting because of economic worries that smoke free ordinances would cause an exodus of smokers to cities without ordinances, which in the metropolitan area often meant merely crossing the street. While Guadalupe’s comprehensive smoke free ordinance passed without incident in its Town Council, out of all of the smoke free ordinances passed in Arizona, Tempe’s had both the most organized opposition and played the greatest role in setting into motion the statewide smoke free initiative that would come in 2006. Tempe’s success in passing Arizona’s first comprehensive smoke free city ordinance including bars by initiative on May 21, 2002 surprised the voluntary health organizations who believed Arizona was not “ready” for smoke free bars and convinced them Arizonans wanted 100% clean indoor air.Dr. Leland Fairbanks and Arizonans Concerned About Smoking created the momentum for Tempe’s groundbreaking smoke free ordinance initiative, Tempeans for Healthy Smoke-Free Workplaces, by investing the time and money necessary to run a viable local ballot initiative campaign. Tempe is home to Arizona State University and Mill Avenue, a central artery of bars, clubs and other venues which cater to the partying University population. A suburb of Phoenix, Tempe has a large student population, which led skeptics to think Tempe would be the last major city in Arizona to pass a comprehensive smoke free ordinance, not the first.As discussed earlier, in 2001 the heads of the greater Phoenix area city governments met with health groups and business leaders to hammer out a region-wide “East Valley Ordinance” that would be amenable to business groups.However, as political compromises and concessions began to unravel the East Valley regional ordinance, the voluntary health organizations’ acquiescence in exempting bars for the regional model ordinance led to Fairbanks and ACAS to strike out on their own in Tempe. In Summer 2001, the Tempe City Council refused to allow Fairbanks to discuss the possibility of a smoke free ordinance at their City Council meeting or put it on the agenda. The only Council member vocally sympathetic to the smoke free ordinance was Dennis Cahill, but he could not help Fairbanks with the Council . The next day Fairbanks collected the forms necessary to place an initiative on the May, 2002 ballot, filed with the City Clerk, and began gathering over 20,000 signatures for a law that would make all indoor spaces in Tempe smoke free, including bars. He submitted the required signatures in December, 2001 for the Tempe for Healthy Smoke-Free Workplaces initiative. ACAS spearheaded the effort, contributing almost the entire $100,000 the campaign raised. ACAS’s action threatened to disrupt the alliances the health groups had formed with business leaders and chambers of commerce to pass their weak regional smoking ordinance , so the health voluntaries attempted to dissuade the ACAS from pursuing their separate smoke free ordinance in Tempe.204 Because ACAS included bars, the one indoor area in which the voluntary health organizations were willing to allow smoking, ACAS did not enjoy the initial support of ACS, AHA, and ALA. These groups believed 1) Arizona was not ready to include bars, and 2) the ACAS did not have the support necessary in Tempe to include bars.ACAS soon proved the health voluntaries wrong. At the same time, the health voluntaries’ strategy of remaining in agreements with regional chambers of commerce was falling apart. Gilbert’s weak smoke free ordinance was to serve as the voluntaries’ model and Scottsdale Mayor Mary Manross had just announced that if Phoenix was not going to be part of the ordinance, then Scottsdale would not either, and Phoenix had made clear that they were not going to budge.