Mayor Ed Murray today said the city will no longer tolerate smoking lounges.
Mayor Ed Murray today said the city "will no longer tolerate" smoking lounges. Dan Nolte, City of Seattle

Claiming they’re associated with violence and flouting state law, Mayor Ed Murray announced today that the city will move to shut down hookah lounges throughout Seattle.

Flanked by city council members, the city attorney, the police chief, and representatives from a number of minority communities, the mayor decried hookah lounges as hotspots of violence that are operating in violation of the state's ban against smoking in indoor public places. While police have not officially connected the July 23 murder of Donnie Chin to a hookah lounge, Murray and others tied this new effort to the killing of Chin, who was the director of the International District Emergency Center. Chin was shot in the same block as King’s Hookah Lounge in the Chinatown-International District. His death was one of three murders in the last 18 months that have occurred near smoking lounges, according to the mayor's office.

“Not all hookah lounges attract violence,” Murray said today, “but the increase in crime that is now associated with many of them combined with the fact that they aren’t following public health codes demands that we take action.”

The issue has come up before. In 2013, Seattle officials planned to crack down on hookah lounges, but then backtracked.

The Seattle Times’ Steve Miletich and Bob Young wrote at the time that “the city’s retreat from the June 22 operation prompted suspicions that election-year politics were the cause, and that Mayor Mike McGinn didn’t want to alienate minority communities that frequented and owned some hookah lounges.”

Because of the the state smoking ban approved by voters in 2005, which prohibits smoking inside places of employment, any smoking lounge with employees is illegal. Smoking lounges have argued they should be exempt from the smoking ban because they are private clubs where employees are part-owners or family members. Murray acknowledged that claim today and said "the evidence we have gathered shows otherwise."

Yet according to the mayor’s office, it wasn’t until a new law was recently passed by the city council that they could actually shut down the businesses.

Here’s why, according the mayoral advisor who crafted the new law: Previously, if a business was violating the law, the city had no way of taking away their business license unless they weren't paying their taxes. (Even the mayor's policy advisor, David Mendoza, recognizes that was “a little crazy.”) Now, under new changes to the city’s business licensing rules, the city can revoke a business license if the business is doing something illegal. Businesses can appeal, but if they continue to operate once their license has been revoked, they can be charged up to $5,000 a day. (The original reason for the new law was to give the city a way to shut down the soon-to-be-dead medical marijuana market.) The law takes effect August 16.

City Attorney Pete Holmes has already started cracking down, today filing misdemeanor charges against King's Hookah Lounge for failure to pay taxes. Holmes said his office may file similar charges against other lounges but wouldn’t speak about specifics.

“It is, in short, an illegal business model,” Holmes said today. “It is time to shut them down.”

Unlike the city's approach to medical marijuana dispensaries, there will be no grace period for so-called "good actors." Murray said today he's looking to shut down all 11 lounges in the city.

Ahmed Ali, executive director of the Somali Health Board, praised the effort and said smoking lounges have been connected to a “pattern of violence and indiscriminate loss of lives of young adults.” Ali also called on the city to create more jobs programs for young people to help prevent them from becoming involved in violence.

“We also need to be proactive to address the underlying causations instead of the usual reactions when we have tragedies of this nature," Ali said.

Along with the three recent homicides, police have responded to “more than 100 fights and disturbances connected to smoking lounges” since 2012, according to the mayor’s office.

When asked today how those issues compare to the same kinds of things police deal with at bars, Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole couldn't immediately provide data but said the operating hours make a difference. Hookah lounges are sometimes open until 4 a.m.

“As a result,” O’Toole said, “when people have nowhere else to go they’re gravitating to the hookah bars… It’s just an attractive nuisance, so to speak.”

Murray acknowledged that the city has had “inconsistent” policies about shutting down nightlife establishments associated with illegal activity, but said the activity inside a bar or club—drinking alcohol—is legal, where smoking at places of employment isn’t.

“If we have a bunch of Irish pubs in this city where young people are being shot and murdered outside them,” Murray added, “I’ll close them down. If it’s happening outside the Knights of Columbus club, I’ll close it down. What we have right now is a situation that is clearly connected to a certain type of business and we’ve got to act.”