Tucson City Council looks to limit hookah lounges' hours, patron ages

The Tucson City Council is considering an ordinance to limit hookah lounges’ hours of operation and the ages of their patrons.

The council directed staff to come back in about a month with a draft ordinance to limit the hours of all hookah lounges within the city that are currently in business. The ordinance, which would impose “regulatory license” requirements, said city attorney Mike Rankin, would also apply to any hookah lounges that open in the future.

The ordinance would also look at “other regulatory aspects” that could be included within the “licensing framework,” he said, such as imposing age requirements for hookah lounges and hookah bars. You have to be 21 in Arizona to buy tobacco, but some hookah lounges in Tucson allow those aged 18 and older to enter, he said.

The item discussed during the first of two council meetings Wednesday afternoon was requested by Ward 6 Councilwoman Karin Uhlich, as a reaction to the Aug. 11 incident outside Arizona Hookah Lounge, near East Speedway and North Swan Road, in which about 200 rounds were fired in a gun battle and four people were injured, two with life-threatening injuries.

“The intent here … it’s really to protect the patrons and the employees and the community, and not pretend that this data doesn’t exist, that this violence doesn’t exist,” Uhlich said Wednesday. “There’s clearly some kind of nexus that we need to get after.”

Tucson police looked into all calls for service at six hookah lounges in the city. The department analyzed data within a quarter-mile radius of the six locations and compared them “against 6 comparable smoke shops and 6 comparable bars.”

According to Tucson police, hookah lounges experience four times more police activity “in and around their location compared to bars. Smoke shops are just behind.” Additionally, there has been an upward trend in police activity, “especially violent crime” around hookah lounges, “whereas bars have seen no change in trend.”

The council also discussed looking into what kind of authority the city has to “require these businesses to provide additional safety measures such as installing camera monitoring systems that would connect to the City’s CSARC facility,” said City Manager Tim Thomure in a memorandum. CSARC is the city’s Community Safety, Awareness and Response Center, which provides “real-time actionable intelligence to the field by incorporating cameras, license plate readers, and other technologies, as well as advanced analytical support, to improve community and staff safety,” Uhlich said in an Aug. 26 newsletter.

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But Rankin on Wednesday wasn’t sure whether or not the city could require such measures, such as cameras or on-site security.

“I haven’t seen those types of regulations or been able to identify a specific, express legal authority that we could comfortably rely on as a licensing requirement. But I am comfortable that if we identify, after establishing a license requirement, noncompliance by one of the locations that’s subject to the licensing requirement, then we could add additional sanctions or requirements to bring them into compliance,” such as on-site security or video monitoring, he said.

Tucson police, in their data analysis, said it would cost an estimated $75,000 “to install hookah lounge locations with advanced CSARC camera monitoring systems.”

Rankin also said he’s confident the council could establish such an ordinance based on the city’s “police powers.” According to Thomure’s memo, that means “the power to adopt regulations that are necessary or convenient for the protection and promotion of public health, safety and welfare is lawful when the City can demonstrate that the regulation is reasonably related to a legitimate government purpose.”

“So in this particular instance, given the demonstrable threat to public health and safety, then I’m comfortable we can act under our ‘police power’ … to establish this regulatory requirement that would apply to existing businesses as well as future (businesses),” Rankin said Wednesday.

This is not the first time the city council has looked to limit the hours of operation of Tucson businesses. In December of last year, the council passed an ordinance that limited the hours of operation for Tucson smoke shops. The ordinance limits where a smoke shop can be built as well as its operating hours, but only applied to any new smoke shop opened within city limits, not to smoke shops that were already open.

The Aug. 11 shootout was not the first shooting stemming from disputes that started at a hookah lounge. In 2018, Dominic Blount killed Avrum Diaz in an exchange of gunfire in what was then known as the Casablanca Hookah Lounge, next door at 4627 E. Speedway.