To the editor:

My business is supplying entertainment equipment to bars, restaurants and hotels in Lawrence. For 20 years, I have done this with some success in a business environment that must have more regulations and be taxed more than most others.

I want to explain what our City Commission’s latest ban has accomplished. First, the few smokers that do enter the bars now go outside to a patio (if the business is lucky enough to receive a permit from the city). The nonsmokers go outside to be with the smokers, as they always have, and our downtown has turned into a big ashtray. The new customers, as the clean-air people promised us, have not shown up yet. I’ve yet to see them. Where are they?

The only customers we have left are mostly outside. They can’t play the jukeboxes or the pool tables. My company can’t pay employees, health insurance, taxes and other money that benefit our city. I have lost 45 percent of our revenues and I work with businesses that have lost up to 40 percent of theirs.

Now here’s the tough part: the double whammy! Not only am I and other businesses trying everything we can to keep the doors open, but now we essentially are being called liars by these clean-air people. Why is it so hard for these people, who don’t even patronize our establishments, to understand?

OK, you hurt us bad. Do you have to call us liars too?

Patrick Conroy,

Lawrence