Veto the smoking ordinance, yer Honor. You’ll survive squawking that primarily comes from afar.

Here it is: The resident contrarian’s case in favor of mayoral intervention in the Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08.

(After all, I wouldn’t want to use the word “veto” … so, sticking to my principles, I’ll happily persist in doing so.)

I’m told that Mayor Doug England will hold a press conference next Tuesday morning circa 10:00 a.m. to reveal whether he’ll put the kibosh on the city council’s controversial smoking ordinance, or permit it to stand on its wobbly feet.

None of us on the outside will ever know the full depth and range of Mayor England’s thought processes in making this decision. I imagine he’s being pelted with advice from all angles (see below for mine), and predictably, outside interests already have weighed in with a full page advertisement in the Tribune, as referenced in today’s Courier-Journal:

Opponents and supporters have continued to lobby England in an attempt to win him over.

One of the latest efforts was from the American Heart Association and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, which took out a full-page ad in today’s New Albany Tribune.

The ad said second-hand smoke causes heart disease, cancer and other health problems, that bar and restaurant workers are at greatest risk and that most area residents support the ordinance.

The ad, which asked if England would stand for “all workers and the public” or “big tobacco and its allies,” urged people to contact the mayor and ask him to sign the measure.

The money spent on that ad alone might have purchased a working toilet or two for a rundown rental property, don’t you think? But I forget so very quickly that the professional public health lobbyists don’t have a dog in the slumlord abatement fight.

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Me?

I believe the mayor should veto the ordinance, primarily because there has yet to be a telephone poll that asks the truly pertinent question: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?

I’m guessing that such a poll would return a majority in favor of smoother driving surfaces, and one well in excess of that portion of the populace favoring a smoking ban in the absence of substantive progress in other areas.

I believe the mayor can make a perfectly logical case that far from being a measure assisting in the furtherance of public health, the ordinance in fact is little more than frivolous in nature – that it is yet another in a series of unfunded mandates of the sort that usually emanate from Indianapolis or Washington, D.C., except that this time around, it comes from our own council. The ordinance as written is unenforceable, and as such, frivolous isn’t too strong a word to describe it.

I believe that the mayor can plausibly connect the smoking issue with economic development by noting that the city council, having established a changed condition of daily business operation that will require fair and equitable enforcement, has made no provision for such enforcement apart from expecting the businesses that stand to be hurt most by the ordinance to pay for its accommodation by constructing elaborate outdoor smoking areas that surely will be the next target of an insatiable (and perpetually carpetbagging) anti-smoking lobby.

I believe the mayor can accurately decry the transparently shambolic nature of council president Gahan’s somewhat less than deft guidance of the smoking “debate,” which in the end comprised a solitary and inadequate public meeting and two catastrophically truncated public “speaking” allowances, all of which amounted to the council’s pro-ban bloc honoring the need for discourse only in the barest of minimum permissible breaches, and not in such a manner as to allow anything remotely approximating sufficient discussion pertaining to a topic destined to divide the citizenry.

Yes, these may be viewed in some quarters as procedural technicalities. I’m not a lawyer, but it is a regular, recurring and fully justified feature of the American system of governance that we expect important decisions to be made in a way – in the “right” way -- that involves people, and not excludes them, and yet the unprecedented speed with which an eternally dormant council moved to facilitate legislative action that was nowhere to be seen or sighted in any council candidate’s platform during the last election.

This largely underreported aspect of the current situation is perhaps the most annoying of all.

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Does anyone else wonder why an issue now being portrayed as critically important did not produce a blip on last year's electoral radar screen?

Does anyone else remember when King Larry Kochert, then the council president, announced that 2007 would be the year when his cherished smoking ban finally came into effect, and the same reactionary who did so much for so long to keep New Albany rooted in the 19th century would suddenly leapfrog the moribund experience of long decades by the magically simple act of chasing smokers from their bar stools, into the streets, to disappear into unrepaired pot holes?

Remember how the smoking ordinance unceremoniously died almost on the spot, and how none of the council members at the time – and none of the candidates challenging them – uttered so much as a peep about smoking as the 2007 election loomed?

How not one of them campaigned on a platform of smoking as the issue most deserving of immediate action in 2008 -- for that matter, was it even in the Top 10 of any candidate's published list of aims?

Was it ever mentioned publicly on the campaign trail one single time?

Actually, to be fair to the candidates, not a one of them offered a decipherable platform of any sort, smoking or otherwise, but I digress.

Which brings me to the primary reason I hope Mayor England vetoes the smoking ordinance. As my high school baseball coach was known to say, the covert way all this has come down, and the timing of it coming down, is chickenshit, plain and simple, and I’m not using that word because I want to spare Steve Price the indignity of being the only potty mouth hereabouts.

Rather, this legislative spectacle was transformed into political theater early on, and it has been bereft of political courage from start to finish. Why this, and why now? No one has provided a satisfactory answer, and until they do: Mayor England, muddy the scrum and veto this ordinance.

Give ‘em a year under strict supervision to do something genuinely progressive, and to undertake it sans the subterfuge that has been such an alarming aspect of the smoking travesty, and I’m quite willing to visit the smoking issue again, but not under the current discredited terms.

I know that quite a few of you disagree with my thoughts, and that’s fine. In the end, given my personal interests and my chosen vocation, perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the historical atrocities wrought by the prohibitionist instinct in America. They’re documented, and they’re real. Given that experience, the legislative bar needs to be higher, doesn't it?