Jump to full article: Seattle (WA) Post-Intelligencer, 2008-06-13
Author: KERY MURAKAMI P-I REPORTER
Intro: Apparently tempers still flare occasionally.
"I will be back," vowed Meg Dalton in one of the heated e-mails she and John Bayliss, owner of Fremont's English-style The George & Dragon Pub, have exchanged for weeks about smoking on the bar's deck. Bayliss, during the argument, had banned Dalton from his establishment.
The exchange began May 19 when Dalton e-mailed Bayliss saying she was new in town and had gone to the bar during the two previous weekends. "On all of these occasions both of your outdoor decks were full of smokers and the smoke was billowing into the inside of the bar," she wrote. "This is unacceptable and I trust that you will immediately correct this situation."
Dalton had copied the health agency, Public Health -- Seattle & King County, which sent inspectors to the bar, and after finding someone smoking, issued a warning, agency spokeswoman Hilary Karasz said. Inspectors will go back and the next violation will carry a $100 fine, she said.
But Bayliss, not pleased by the inspection, blamed Dalton in a June 4 e-mail for cutbacks: "so thank you very much ... now our business sales have dropped because the smokers can't smoke outside ... they are just going to go to one of a thousand places where people smoke on patios or outside the bars. So now I will have to terminate the employment of several staff ... "
But Dalton responded that Bayliss' "customers wouldn't go elsewhere if the law were being enforced uniformly" . . .
In fact, bars and taverns statewide have seen a greater increase in business than before the smoking ban's passage in 2005, according to a state Department of Revenue study released Tuesday.
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