Gene Bennett doesn't hide his contempt for city government.

After the city started its smoking ban, Bennett parked a "smoking trailer" - a big semitrailer with room for patrons topped by a giant fake cigarette - next to the tavern he has owned for 28 years.

On the side of the trailer he posted a sign: "Surgeon General Warning ... Voting for Mayor Dave is Hazardous to Your Business."

The smoking trailer, which didn't amuse city health and building code inspectors, is gone for now.

But the owner of Bennett's Meadowood Country Club off Verona Road still buys confrontational ads every week in local entertainment publications. The ads fire zingers like, "Happiness in Madison: 14 of 20 City Council members on a milk carton."

"I'm not gonna sit here and let them run me out of business," Bennett said in an interview in his cluttered office at the back of the tavern, showing a shoebox full of clipped newspaper ads he's saved.

Bennett is among a group who own blue-collar bars on the city's outskirts that compete with bars in neighboring communities that allow smoking in taverns.

Since smoking was outlawed, the bar smells better, Bennett conceded. But that doesn't fill the cash register, he said, adding that the bar's gross receipts recovered, but he's selling more food and less liquor and making less profit.

He reviles council members who banned smoking.

"The people who voted (for the ban) wouldn't come here if I gave them free beer. ... The only people they want in Madison is insurance companies, banks and the students."

The recently defeated paid sick leave proposal, he said, would have killed small businesses.

"What are they gonna do next?" he said. "If you weigh more than 200 pounds, you can only get three french fries?

"(Expletive) do-gooders."

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