Published: June 23, 2009 04:28 pm      

Dead for now — 06/24/09

House wasted time and money on bill Senate would defeat

It’s too bad that Monday’s vote by the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee that effectively killed the House-approved bill to allow video slots at Kentucky race tracks could not have been taken much sooner. If it could have been, it would have saved the state thousand of dollars by greatly shortening the length of the special session.

Instead, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives wasted a week debating a slots bill that never had a chance of being approved by the Republican-controlled Senate. In fact, if it had not been for the great House debate on slots, the work of the special session probably could have been completed in two days, and at a cost of $60,000 a day, the shorter the session, the more money it saves for a state needing to slash nearly a billion dollars in spending just to balance its budget.

But the Kentucky Constitution demands that revenue bills begin in the House of Representatives, meaning that body had to act on the video slots bill before the Senate could take up the issue. But even before the special session began, Senate President David Williams had sent a clear message that he would not support any bill to expand gambling. Thus, even Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo had to know that the odds of convincing the General Assembly to approve a slots bill ranged somewhere between slim and none.

The defeat of the House bill certainly does not mean an end to the debate in Frankfort over expanded gambling. Our hope is that when legislators meet in regular session in January, they will agree to put a constitutional amendment to allow expanded gambling on the Kentucky ballot.

Our position on expanded gambling has not changed: Put it on the ballot and let the people of Kentucky decide.