Smoking banned; text messaging OK

THUMBS UP TO:

Smoking ban’s advance

round of applause for the Virginia Senate’s Health and Education Committee which advanced three separate public smoking bans to the Senate floor. It’s about time for Virginia to get in step with the rest of the world and act to protect the health and welfare of non-smoking children and adults.

The three bills vary in their level of protection. One bans almost all public smoking; another is a restaurant-only ban; the third would allow localities to decide the matter for themselves. We prefer the strongest protection – the full public ban – but a restaurant ban is a significant step in the proper direction. The Senate has passed public smoking bans in the last two sessions and will likely do so again. We urge the House not to kill this needed, health-protective measure.

Snuffing out smoking at the speedway

Bristol Motor Speedway and Bristol Dragway became the latest sports venues to protect the health of fans by banning smoking in the grandstands. Track officials said they did so to comply with state law. The University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium was ahead of the curve – banning smoking in most seating areas before the law was changed. Expect more venues to follow suit.

Stadiums and other sporting venues were one of the last locations where smokers were free to light up at will and non-smokers had no refuge from their poisons. We applaud the change and hope that other venues, including area high school stadiums, will do the same.

Preparing for drought

A drought isn’t the sort of natural disaster that arrives with storm and fury. It creeps in quietly over time, but its impact can be devastating. Although winter’s rains have eased our region’s drought to an extent, we could still face trouble in spring or summer. So, we applaud Bristol Virginia’s efforts to purchase floating pumps, which will protect the city’s water supply even if lake levels continue to drop. It never hurts to be prepared.

THUMBS DOWN TO:

Opting for a study rather than action

Text messaging while driving is a stellarly bad idea. The act of sending a text message requires the driver to look away from the road for seconds at a time. Traffic conditions change rapidly. Inattention can lead to tragedy.

One would expect state lawmakers to recognize this danger and act appropriately. This isn’t a nanny-state overreach; it’s a common sense reaction to an increasing threat. In the face of a stern law and a potential ticket, many motorists would think twice before text messaging.

Virginia lawmakers, not always noted for their common sense, opted to delay such a law for at least a year – sending a proposed text-message ban off into study committee Siberia. A similar measure is still alive in the Tennessee legislature. We hope that Tennessee lawmakers will provide an example for their Virginia counterparts to follow, as they did on the public smoking ban last year.

A vote against budget transparency

One of the boldest good-government initiatives to come out of Richmond of late was a plan to put the state’s budget online in a searchable database. The database archive would house a decade of information. Presumably, such a database would make it easier for residents to find out how the state spends their tax dollars.

Too bad it won’t happen this year. House and Senate committees voted to defer the measure until 2009. State officials had indicated it would be hard to comply with the bill’s timetable and had estimated it would cost more than $522,000 initially to implement it. Recurring costs of more than $400,000 were projected. It’s likely that lawmakers balked at the costs, but government transparency is worth the price tag.