WHEREAS:
The U.S. Surgeon General released a landmark report in 2006 stating that there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure kills nearly 500,000 Americans every year.1 For the gaming industry, workers on casino floors are largely people of color and women; lack of access to smokefree air can deepen existing disparities in health outcomes.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed long-held business assumptions across many industries. For the gaming industry, customers became much more sensitive to indoor air quality and how such air affects their health.
While our Company may have efforts to address indoor air quality, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers states: “There is no currently available or reasonably anticipated ventilation or air cleaning system that can adequately control or significantly reduce the health risks of environmental tobacco smoke to an acceptable level.” 2
As independent researchers C3 Gaming found in analyzing revenue performance in several competitive casino markets, smokefree casinos, for the first time, generated more revenue: “Data from multiple jurisdictions clearly indicates that banning smoking no longer causes a dramatic drop in gaming revenue. In fact, non-smoking properties appear to be performing better than their counterparts that continue to allow smoking.”3
There are potential business risks to allowing indoor smoking in Caesars Entertainment properties, from higher employee health insurance premiums (when compared with casinos that don’t permit indoor smoking), greater maintenance costs, and deterring a significant number of potential visitors who won’t visit a casino due exposure to tobacco smoke (88.5% of the American public does not smoke).4
Shareholders have no guidance as to the costs our Company is bearing for continuing to allow indoor smoking, nor has the Company disclosed the social and environmental costs and risks imposed on its stakeholders.
Parx Casino’s Chief Marketing Officer told the Play Pennsylvania website in February 2023 that since the casino went smokefree, Parx has seen a positive effect on the health and morale of employees, and did not increase health insurance premiums: “Frankly, we are starting to see health costs go down….What’s been interesting to me, is a lot of our smoking guests have actually said things like, ‘I never realized how smoky and annoying it was. I really don’t mind walking 50 feet out to the smoking patio.”5
New customer preferences require an examination of the status quo in which smoking is allowed in gaming properties around the country. We believe our Company could enhance its ESG initiatives by conducting the report that our proposal requests. We urge Caesars Entertainment shareholders to vote in favor of this proposal.
1 https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm 
2 https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/about/position%20documents/pd_environmental-tobacco-smoke-2020-07-1.pdf 
3 https://8b3e0552-f01a-40e0-b077-ea4813c4af0b.usrfiles.com/ugd/8b3e05_348baee6d05949ad9b4adae2b7a77105.pdf 
4 https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm 
5 https://www.playpennsylvania.com/g2e-panel-discussion-parx-casino-smoking