ANDERSON — The city’s future as a smoke-free municipality is back to square one after the City Council voted down an ordinance on Thursday that would have prohibited smoking in the city’s work and public places.

Most council members voted no on the basis that the ordinance wasn’t comprehensive enough, allowing exemptions for taverns, clubs and Hoosier Park Racing and Casino, among others. They were applauded for their decision by an audience full of people wearing smoke-free Anderson shirts who called for a stronger ordinance.

Only Councilman Art Pepelea Jr. voted for the ordinance, which he helped author as part of the council’s Health Committee.

“I’m shocked and astonished that we have people in the community who would rather have nothing than have something,” Pepelea said.

However, Councilman Rodney Chamberlain, who also is on the Health Committee and was originally for the ordinance, changed his mind after deciding without a comprehensive smoking ordinance, the city would still be a smoking community.

“After hearing what I’m hearing today, it’s going to be very hard for me to support (the ordinance),” Chamberlain said. “We’re either going to have a nonsmoking community or we’re going to have a smoking community.”

Four members of the Health Committee did not support the ordinance, as stated in a letter from Dr. Bill VanNess, CEO of Community Hospital; Tom VanOsdol, president of operations for Saint John’s Health System; Karesa Knight-Wilkerson, executive director of Healthy, Tobacco-Free Madison County; and Mark Dudley, board president of Healthy, Tobacco-Free Madison County.

“The current ordinance has many exemptions and does not protect employees,” the letter read. “It does not meet the 2006 Surgeon General’s guidelines on secondhand smoke, and it would give the citizens of Anderson a false sense of protection due to the exemptions.”

The ordinance’s goal was to protect children, as Pepelea had made clear from its beginning, but a line of speakers that filed out the door of the Council Chambers called for an ordinance that would protect all workers.

“(The current ordinance) has many exceptions that would not protect the workers from the dangers of secondhand smoke,” VanOsdol said.

Knight-Wilkerson presented a petition to the council with 3,500 signatures in favor of a more comprehensive smoking ban.

Pepelea called for the council to pass the ordinance to set an example for the rest of the state, but others said an ordinance with so many exemptions would not make the city a leader, as other cities have passed stricter smoking bans.

If it had been passed, the ordinance could have been amended as needed to get rid of exemptions or make other changes, but Knight-Wilkerson said it was unlikely the issue would ever get revisited, leaving Anderson with a smoking ban full of holes.

“When a bad ordinance is passed, it is not revisited because it takes so much time, so much energy and so much passion,” she said.

Others were not in favor of the ordinance because they thought it was not the city’s job to legislate businesses’ choices of whether to be smoke-free.