State hits pause button on casinos
Looks like we can all hold our horses on the idea of roulette wheels, blackjack dealers and Texas hold’em tables in Georgia, at least for the time being. It appears the casino gambling issue, politically speaking, won’t even make it out of the starting gate this year.
As reported Monday by staff writer Chuck Williams, the bill sponsored by Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, never even got a second reading before the Senate Regulated Industries Committee, rendering it effectively tabled for this legislative session.
Maybe, if just for now, that’s just as well.
The increasing momentum (not to mention lobbying pressure) behind the casino idea has acquired a rushed, fill-in-the-blanks-later feel to it in recent months. It’s as though the carts were already being designed and equipped long before anybody gave the OK to buying the horses — or even how many to buy, or how much they would cost.
What we have are the outlines of what might (or might not) be a good idea for raising desperately needed money for critical state needs, but with not nearly enough details filled in.
There was the eleventh-hour scrambling to expand the list of what the revenues from casinos would fund, in an effort to make the bill appealing enough to persuade lawmakers statewide to support casinos in Atlanta and Savannah. There’s the still unresolved question of the population “triggers” that limited the initial legislation to those two cities. If the bill passed, could it be amended and expanded later to include second-tier cities like Columbus? That’s certainly the hope of Columbus co-sponsors Ed Harbison in the Senate and Calvin Smyre in the House, but that issue is still very much up in the air — even more so now, perhaps, than it was just a few days ago.
And, as Harbison noted, there’s a further twist: Next year is an election year. It might be that lawmakers would prefer to focus on getting reelected without the inevitable controversy that gambling legislation brings with it.
In any case, lawmakers will have at least another year, maybe two, to fill in some of the missing details. That’s probably not a bad thing.
Checkbook justice
Rewind, change the names, play it again.
Auto parts maker Takata Corp. of Japan pleaded guilty Monday to fraud for deliberately concealing an air bag defect that killed at least 16 people, 11 of them in the United States, and injured more than 180. Takata admitted to concealing evidence that millions of its air bag inflators were dangerously explosive.
The company will pay $850 million in restitution to automakers who bought its products, $125 million in damages and $25 million in criminal fines.
Associated Press reports that three former Takata executives still in Japan are charged with falsifying test reports. It will be interesting to see if actual human accountability attaches to crimes like this any better there than it does here.
This story was originally published February 28, 2017 at 5:02 PM with the headline "State hits pause button on casinos."