Harsher smoking ban jeopardizes convention business

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KPRC-2 is reporting that if City Council passes a harsher smoking ban than what Mayor White has proposed, the city could lose some big business:

Sources told Local 2 Monday that if the ban passes, the city could lose convention center business.

Officials with Alcoholics Anonymous, the National Retailer Federation, the National Convenience Store Operators and the National Tobacco Retailers Association threatened to pull their conventions out of Houston.

“I want to be careful that we don’t hurt ourselves economically,” said Jordy Tollet, with the Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau.

He gave council members copies of a letter from the National Tobacco Retailers Association, which has scheduled a 2007 convention in Houston.

“There’s 15,000 hotel room nights for tobacco dealers, so roughly, that’s somewhere between $15 and $20 million that would be lost on our community,” Tollet said.


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Anne Linehan is a co-founder of blogHOUSTON.