Bars and Restaurants of San Francisco,

Co-Signing Small Business Community and Residents

San Francisco, California

April 27, 2026

President and Members

San Francisco Board of Supervisors

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place

City Hall, Room 244

San Francisco, CA 94102

RE: OPPOSITION to File No. 260361 – Health Code – Smoke-free Places (Supervisor Melgar et al.)

Dear President and Members of the Board of Supervisors:

We, the undersigned bars, restaurants, and small businesses of San Francisco along with our patrons, write in firm opposition to File No. 260361, introduced by Supervisor Myrna Melgar and co-sponsored by Supervisors Danny Sauter, Alan Wong, and Connie Chan. This ordinance would amend the Health Code to prohibit smoking on the outdoor patios of bars and taverns, and eliminate longstanding exceptions that have allowed certain establishments to maintain indoor smoking areas consistent with state law.

While we respect the Board’s concern for public health, we believe this legislation is misguided in its scope, timing, and priorities — and we urge the Board to reject it.

I. San Francisco’s Regulatory Burden on Small Businesses Is Already Unsustainable

San Francisco has earned a national reputation as one of the most difficult cities in which to operate a small business. Bars and restaurants, in particular, navigate a labyrinth of overlapping local regulations that far exceed state and federal requirements. The compliance costs associated with these requirements run into the tens of thousands of dollars annually for small operators.

The outdoor patio smoking ban strikes at establishments that have, in many cases, built their entire business model around the legal use of those spaces — cigar bars, legacy neighborhood taverns that serve a clientele with well-established preferences. These are private businesses hosting consenting adults. The exception that allows smoking in bars with no employees, and in historically compliant semi-enclosed smoking rooms, was not a loophole — it was a deliberate and reasonable accommodation of real-world business diversity.

Eliminating these exceptions will force some establishments to close entirely, or to lose a critical portion of their customer base at a time when the San Francisco hospitality industry has not yet recovered from the compounding crises of the pandemic, downtown vacancy, retail flight, and public safety concerns. The city’s restaurant and bar sector lost hundreds of businesses in the past five years. This is not the moment to pile on additional restrictions.

We also note that California state law already provides one of the most comprehensive indoor smoking bans in the nation. San Francisco’s existing Health Code is, in many respects, stricter still. The marginal public health benefit of this ordinance — restricting smoking on outdoor patios where air circulation is inherently greater — does not justify the concrete economic harm it will inflict on affected businesses.

II. The Board of Supervisors Must Address the City’s Real Crises — Not Legislate Symbolically at the Expense of Small Business

San Francisco is in the midst of crises that demand the urgent, sustained attention of every elected official in this city. Housing costs have rendered the city unaffordable for working families, educators, healthcare workers, and the very hospitality workers who staff the establishments the Board now seeks to further regulate. The permitting process for new housing remains so slow, so expensive, and so laden with discretionary review that meaningful supply growth continues to lag. Commercial vacancies in neighborhoods across the city — from the Tenderloin to the Outer Sunset — remain at record highs.

Against this backdrop, File No. 260361 is a telling indicator of misaligned priorities. This ordinance does not add a single unit of housing. It does not speed a single permit. It does not address the fentanyl crisis that makes it impossible for tourists, residents, and workers to safely navigate our streets. It does not return a single shuttered storefront to productive use. It does not reduce the cost of doing business in this city by a single dollar.

What it does is send a message — and that message is not directed at the problems San Franciscans are living with every day. It is directed at a particular lifestyle, a particular set of businesses, and a particular class of customer. It is legislation as statement, not legislation as solution.

We have seen this pattern before. When the Board has a choice between tackling the intractable complexity of housing, permitting, or homelessness, and passing a targeted, interest-group-friendly ordinance that generates press coverage without requiring hard political tradeoffs, the latter too often wins. File No. 260361 follows this pattern precisely. We respectfully but forcefully submit that San Francisco’s small businesses deserve better from their elected representatives.

III. Well-established businesses with the grandfathered rights for smoking in the their backyards were not consulted by the sponsors of this legislation

In her presentation to the Small Business Commission on April 27th, Jen Low (representing the legislation sponsors) was specifically asked which small businesses they had consulted in writing the legislation. She evaded the question – not naming any businesses directly. We have consulted bar and taverns in San Francisco, and we were not able to identify any impacted businesses that were consulted by the sponsors of the legislation.

As owners of the establishments that have defined this city for the last half century, we implore you to support us as we still struggle to survive. Many of us are still depending our balance sheets to sustain our businesses as the industry has not fully rebounded since the pandemic.  We need to focus our efforts on revenue-generating activities rather than overseeing additional compliance – compliance that will inevitably cause further friction between our staff and our customers and lead to negative reviews.

IV. Our Request

We call on the Board of Supervisors to:

•  Vote NO on File No. 260361 in its current form.

•  Commit to a moratorium on new regulatory burdens on bars, restaurants, and small businesses until the city has conducted a comprehensive cumulative impact study of existing compliance costs.

•  Direct the same legislative energy that produced this ordinance toward meaningful action on housing permitting reform, commercial vacancy, and small business stabilization.

•  Engage directly and honestly with the hospitality industry before advancing any further legislation that affects our operating conditions.

San Francisco’s bars, restaurants, and small businesses are not obstacles to a better city — we are the fabric of it. We are the neighborhood anchors, the employers, the tax base, and the culture that make this city worth living in. We ask only that the Board govern accordingly.

Respectfully submitted,

Bars, Restaurants and small businesses of San Francisco

Patrons of these establishments

Specifically, the undersigned businesses, organizations and individuals:

1. El Rio (Historic Legacy Business of San Francisco, est. 1978) - District 9
2. Zeitgeist (Historic Legacy Business of San Francisco, est. 1977) - District 9
3. Small Business Forward
4. The Stud (est. 1966) - District 6
5. Horsies Market & Saloon - District 9 
6. Casements - District 9
7. Mothership Bar - District 9 
8. Mother - District 9
9. The Alembic - District 5
10. Powerhouse Bar - District 6
11. Thee Parkside - District 11
12. The Laundry Corner - District 1
13. Kilowatt - District 9
14. The National Harm Reduction Coalition
15. (adding as more sign on)