Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS. : CITIES : Nonsmokers to Call the Shots in Anaheim

The Anaheim City Council passed one of the stiffest no-smoking ordinances in Southern California, giving every person employed in the city the right to ban cigarette smoke from his or her immediate work area.

The ordinance was passed over the unbending opposition of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, which labeled any mandatory smoking regulation an “unacceptable invasion into the private sector.”

Hardly that, said Councilman Irv Pickler. “I feel we have something here that is common sense,” he said.

The ordinance, which passed 3 to 1 (Mayor Don Roth, who is running for county supervisor, abstained), requires employees to draft a policy barring smoking in common areas, to designate at least half of employee eating areas as non-smoking areas and to allow every employee the right to ban smoking in his or her immediate work area.

The council was gentler with restaurants, which had strongly opposed the measure. Under the ordinance, restaurants with seating for 50 or more customers must designate “adequate” non-smoking areas, but the ordinance does not define “adequate.”

And while the City Council forbade smoking in movie theaters, it decreed that smoking “may be prohibited” in auditoriums or enclosed facilities open to the public. The action exempted from mandatory regulation the city-owned Anaheim Convention Center, which, the council had been told, might otherwise lose convention business.

Then the council members voted 3 to 2 not to ban smoking in the City Council chambers.