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Group to seek smoking ban at Turning Stone

Thursday, May 12, 2005
By Glenn Coin
Staff writer


A citizens group plans to go to court to force Oneida County to crack down on smoking at Turning Stone Resort and Casino, one of the last bastions in the region where smokers can light up.

Upstate Citizens for Equality decided this week to ask a judge to intervene. The group's president, David Vickers, said he is preparing legal papers, and next week plans to file the action in state court against county health department officials.

"What they're trying to do is ignore this law out there that compels them to act," Vickers said. "We want laws applied equally to everybody, regardless of race."

Turning Stone is owned by the Oneida Indian Nation, which argues the state's no-smoking law doesn't apply because the resort sits on sovereign Indian territory. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March, however, that the nation can't claim sovereignty on land it has bought in the past two decades.

Despite that decision, nation spokesman Mark Emery said, federal law and previous Supreme Court decisions make nation land immune from local and state laws.

Nick DeRosa, Oneida County's director of environmental health services, said his department has not taken any action at Turning Stone and didn't know if it would.

"We haven't gotten any direction on that as of yet," DeRosa said.

A spokesman for Gov. George Pataki said late last month that enforcing the state smoking ban at Turning Stone was "under discussion." Oneida County Executive Joe Griffo said then that any directive to enforce the ban would have to come from the state.

However, the state law calls on county health departments to enforce the smoking ban.

"We can debate about whether it's smart to make the county health departments the enforcement agents I don't think it is but that's the law," Vickers said.

Vickers filed a complaint with the county April 22. Nothing happened, he said, so it's time to take the next step and go to court.

"That's the only mechanism available to compel them to do what their job requires them to do," Vickers said. "All we're asking is to follow the letter of the law."

The local and statewide chapters of the American Cancer Society also have called on health officials to enforce the smoking ban at Turning Stone since the Supreme Court decision.