Despite, or perhaps because of, the voluntary decision by Hanovers Draught Haus to ban smoking in the popular local bar March 5, Pflugerville Mayor Jeff Coleman says the city is unlikely to visit a city-wide ban in the near future.

Coleman had originally asked city staff to examine the possibility of writing a smoking ban that would grandfather in existing businesses in light of the number of new restaurants coming into town.

"My main question was to grandfather existing businesses because I did not want to hurt their business," Coleman said. "I'm not interested at all in taking away their rights."

City Manager Brandon Wade said the smoking ban would likely come up at some point but that the City Council's focus was elsewhere for the time being.

"Right now, we have other things that we're focusing on," Wade said. "Certainly a smoking ordinance is very important to us, especially with the development coming in."

Wade said it appeared the city could write a smoking ordinance to grandfather in existing businesses.

Hanovers Draught Haus

One business that won't be worrying about a future smoking ban is Hanovers Draught Haus, the popular bar and live music venue in downtown Pflugerville. The bar voluntarily went smoke free March 5.

Smoking will still be allowed on the patio and in the bar in the back of the venue.

"We think that the greater good will come [of the ban]," co-owner Adeline Bui said. "Everybody loves us. The only thing they don't like is the smoke."

Bui said she expects many of the cities surrounding Austin to follow that city's lead and ban smoking, even in bars. Austin banned smoking in bars as of September 2005.

To the north, Round Rock allows smoking in bars so long as those bars receive more than half their receipts from alcohol rather than food sales.

Hanovers, though, decided to go ahead with the ban ahead of any city action after Bui and her husband and co-owner Eddie Tran—who is a smoker—began to talk to customers about the issue.

"We started getting a lot of complaints from our nonsmokers, that this place just reeks," Bui said. "They open the front door, and it's just like this wind of smoke right in their face."

She said her biggest fear about the ban was that the bar would lose business, and that if Hanovers did not have other things to offer—the bar has regular live music and sports a set of volleyball courts—she and Tran likely would have waited for the city to take action first.

"Yes, it is going to hurt us in the short term, but in the long term, I think it's going to help us because it opens new doors for new people to come in," she said.

Those new doors include not only new customers, but also new musical acts. Bui said some bands would refuse to play at the bar because smoking was allowed and that smoke shortened the life of equipment in the bar.

But to Bui, the option to smoke in her bar is also a personal issue.

"I personally love it. I have children and I'm here. I work five days a week," she said. "That means even though I don't smoke, I'm smoking.

"If I'm here for the next 30 years, I'm not going to die of lung cancer, or I'm not going to have some kind of respiratory complication just because somebody else next to me is smoking," she said.