Village tries to snuff out hookah bars

If you want to open a hookah bar in Rockville Centre, move quickly. One of two proposed bills that will be up for public debate at the Oct. 6 Board of Trustees meeting would ban hookah lounges in the village.

Hookahs are water pipes used for smoking flavored tobacco. Though the smoke passes though water before it is inhaled, hookah smoking has many of the same health risks as cigarette smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Because of the way a hookah is used,” the CDC states on its website, “smokers may absorb more of the toxic substances also found in cigarette smoke than cigarette smokers do.”

Hookah lounges range from cafes to nightclubs. In recent years they have become popular with young adults, especially in New York City. There are 14 hookah lounges on Long Island. In the past year, however, the Village of Patchogue and the City of Glen Cove have banned hookah bars, and in August, Great Neck Estates widened its smoking ban to include places where smoking any substance is part of the main business operation.

Rockville Centre Trustee Michael Sepe said that the village was looking to ban the lounges because studies say that patrons will sit in a bar for several hours — meaning that they spend little money elsewhere in town while taking up parking spaces. Sepe also cited concerns that hookah bars are more likely to become disorderly.

“We don’t do anything precipitously,” he said of the board’s deliberations. “We thought about this for months, and looked into other villages had done. Our reflex is not to ban things without giving them a second thought.” The village is putting this bill forward now because no one has tried to open a hookah bar yet, Sepe said, and it did not want to be unfair to a potential applicant.

Other businesses the village has banned include fortune telling, palm reading, and phrenology — analyzing someone’s personality based on the shape of the skull. Tattoo parlors and off-track gambling are also prohibited.

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