When the City Council approved Madison's smoking ban in 2004, area bars and cigarette smokers were outraged. But lost in the shuffle was Maduro, 117 E. Main St., a cigar bar that now looks poised to shut down.
Visit Maduro in the summer and you will have a hard time noticing the toll the smoking ban has taken on the bar. An outdoor patio allows cigar enthusiasts and novice smokers alike to puff legally and in comfort.
'Many times we're full outside with two people at the bar,' said owner Brian Haltimer. However, Haltimer said the bar has struggled since October.
'When the cold weather finally hit, people just stopped hanging out outside,' Haltimer said. 'Now we're down to sales like they were almost five years ago.'
With business down 40 percent and a staff that has been cut in half in recent months, Maduro could be nearing closure, Haltimer said.
The bar's last hope now appears to be an exemption to Madison's controversial smoking ban that Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, introduced to the City Council Tuesday.
Verveer has tried and failed twice before to secure an exemption for Maduro. He said the current proposal would be his last attempt at altering the smoking ban.
'The one and only cigar bar left is in my aldermanic district and I don't want to see it go out of business,' Verveer said. 'The city literally is slowly putting Maduro out of business.'
According to Verveer, the exemption would not allow cigarette smoking in any circumstances. In effect, Haltimer said, Verveer is proposing 'a Maduro exemption.'
But Verveer said some critics on the council worry that an exemption now would open the door for other bars searching to pump up business through legal smoking.
Ald. Brenda Konkel, District 2, voted twice against exemptions in the past. She said allowing an exemption for one bar is unfair to other businesses affected by the ban.
'It's unfair for certain bars to allow smoking when other bars can't,' Konkel said. 'It's about having a level playing field.'
Konkel said it is too simple to exclusively blame the smoking ban for Maduro's woes.
'I don't know if they're going out of business because there are too many bars in the downtown area, or because they're rude to customers when they come in there or if they're going out of business because of smoking,' Konkel said.
Haltimer now says he hopes the council will find the 11 votes needed to pass the exemption. Otherwise, he said, the end is near for Maduro.
'We've talked about the worst possible cases,' Haltimer said of the possibility that the exemption would be rejected. 'If that happens, I don't quite know where we're going to go.'
