Jun. 4, 2003 - Olmsted County's no-smoking ordinance has extinguished cigarettes in restaurants. It also apparently has snuffed out a projected $1.1 million worth of future convention business. 

American Veterans, one of the nation's best-known veterans groups, has pulled its 2005 national convention out of Rochester and booked it in Kansas City, Mo., which does not have a smoking ban. "This is the first one that has blatantly said 'We are going to some place where we don't have to deal with their smoking ordinance,'" said Brenda Riggott, executive director for the Rochester Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. 

The AmVets convention would have drawn 1,500 visitors into town for a full week in August, which traditionally is a slow convention time in Rochester. The veterans would have accounted for about 5,000 hotel-night stays. 

"They had very few meal functions at the convention center," Riggott said. "Most of their evenings were free; that meant they would have been in the restaurants." 

The convention bureau estimates the AmVets likely would have left between $1 million and $1.1 million in the local economy, based on typical spending patterns. 

Rochester had won a vote of AmVets members and was awarded the bid as host city in 2000, and Riggott made the pitch to the group. The Rochester bid beat proposals from Kansas City and Reno, Nev. "There was no (anti-smoking) ordinance in place when we got the business," Riggott said. Negotiations for lodging with hotels and for events at the Mayo Civic Center had begun, but the contracts had not been signed by the time Olmsted County approved its smoking ban in restaurants in November 2001, Riggott said. 

The issue turned into a major obstacle. 

"When we first met three years ago, I made it abundantly clear that AmVets is a large smoking group," executive meeting planner Linda Ann Tucker wrote in an April 2003 rejection letter. 

The 18-month-old ban wasn't a stumbling block in the city-run civic center because an exemption for private parties allowed the AmVets to decide on smoking, manager Donna Drews said. Local hotels and their restaurants also tried to accommodate the AmVets by promising private areas for convention-goers to light up without violating the ordinance, Riggott said. 

But contracts still were unsigned last fall, and AmVets reopened the bidding for the 2005 meeting. Rochester wasn't notified to compete. Kansas City was named host city over Milwaukee, San Antonio and others, AmVets spokesman Dick Flanagan said this week. 

Flanagan said other contract problems besides the no-smoking ordinance were involved in bypassing Rochester, but the smoking ban was the tangible issue, he said. 

The AmVets have written rules preventing any city with a no-smoking ordinance from competing for their business, Riggott said. Tucker formally notified the convention bureau of the AmVets decision in an April 2 letter. 

The AmVets meeting will be difficult to replace, because of its size and because of the time of year, Riggott said. 

"It's always disappointing to lose a piece of business and especially (so) when it was wrapped up first," she said. "Thankfully, that doesn't happen very often... and you move on." 

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(c) 2003, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.