Hoopeston Bar is First Fined Under Smoke-Free Illinois Act

The owners of a bar in Hoopeston will be the first to pay a fine for violating the Smoke-Free Illinois Act.

Vermilion County Health Department Administrator Steve Laker says there have been several complaints regarding Deano's on Main. But the $100 fine stems from one incident last March, when a health department worker found a customer smoking while on a routine inspection. An administrative law judge upheld the fine late last month.

Laker says it's become easier to seek out fines against bars and restaurants for smoking since March. Now the process is handled by administrative fines, rather than criminal penalties handed out by a state's attorney's office.

And Laker says he expects complaints to pick up. "These places that we've had multiple citations on, we're just going to randomly inspect them - we're not necessarily going to wait for complaints," says Laker. "Now this is the time of year that complaints start coming back in because it's cold outside, it's windy, it's wet. And so they want to smoke inside instead of outside, so we'll start getting more complaints." Illinois' first administrative hearings over violations of the smoking ban were recently held in Champaign. The Hoopeston bar must pay its $100 fine by December, or owners won't be able to renew food service permits.