City Council members are quietly floating modified proposals to Mayor Bloomberg’s tough indoor-smoking bill in hopes of reaching a compromise, The Post has learned.
Sources said that while most council members are ready to ban smoking in bars, there wasn’t agreement on other parts of the Bloomberg bill, which also applies to restaurants and outdoor cafes.
One insider described the new council proposals as “modifications that were relatively minor – but not completely.”
Bloomberg wants to ban smoking in just about all public spaces, from bars to billiard parlors – including hotel lobbies.
One change that several council members are advocating would allow smoking near hotel elevators, sources said.
The only exemptions in the mayor’s bill are for private homes and cars, hotel rooms, tobacco outlets and limousines.
Officials on both sides tried to downplay the behind-the-scenes negotiations, saying there was no breakthrough.
But council sources said Bloomberg is ready to back a “living wage” bill that Speaker Gifford Miller considers a priority – which the mayor had once opposed – because Miller is prepared to support some version of Bloomberg’s smoking bill.
Spokesmen for Bloomberg and Miller said the smoking and living-wage bills were not linked.
“They are separate issues,” insisted Ed Skyler, the mayor’s press secretary. “One has nothing to do with the other.”
The smoking issue came up in a regularly scheduled meeting yesterday between Bloomberg and Miller, who has yet to take a public position on the mayor’s no-smoking bill.
Bloomberg has said he’d like to see the new law passed before the Great American Smoke Out next month.
Since he took office, Bloomberg has taken up an anti-smoking crusade.
One of his first orders of business was to push through a $1.42 cigarette tax hike, which raised cigarettes to about $7.50 a pack.
Then he recorded a radio spot touting the dangers of secondhand smoke and asking for public support.
Bloomberg told the council earlier this month that his bill would increase business for bars and taverns. “If I owned a bar, I would love to have this legislation passed . . . if people aren’t smoking, they would be drinking more,” the mayor said.