English Transcription of KFOX News Clip
Meanwhile El Paso Mayor Ray Caballero is celebrating the one-year mark of our own straight smoking ban. Caballero unveiled new numbers out just today that show not only our local restaurants and bars unaffected by the ban but they made more profit than ever before. The year-end sales tax receipts show El Paso's bars and restaurants made about 1.7 billion dollars last year compared to 1.6 billion in 2001. Mayor pro tem Larry Medina says, the smoking ban not only makes El Paso more money, it saves lives: “We are not talking about one life or a dozen lives or just a couple of hundred lives. We are literally talking ladies and gentlemen over the years to come literally thousands of people’s lives we are saving just here in little old El Paso in little old Texas.”
Medina says representatives from cities across the country are now using El Paso as a model for their own non-smoking ordinances.