Published: June 20, 2009 11:09 pm      

Williams says Senate won’t pass gambling

The Kentucky State Senate on Friday packaged their versions of four bills into the two they had been sent by the House and passed them all after the House had passed a bill to allow video slot machines at horse tracks.

But that bill never reached the Senate. And when the Senate passed two amended House bills now containing most of Gov. Steve Beshear’s budget fix, funding authorities for major construction projects, an economic incentives plan and a non-gambling proposal to help boost breeders’ incentives and purses at the tracks – by then the House was gone for the weekend.

And it didn’t send the Senate the slots bill – meaning that chamber could not act on it before Monday.

Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, opposes expanded gambling and said again Friday it cannot pass that chamber.

“There never have been 19 solid votes here,” Williams said in a floor speech.

The slots bill would produce money to boost race purses and incentives for breeders, the same thing the bill’s supporters say other states are using to lure horses from Kentucky. In the House, Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, also added a $1 billion bonding plan to construct new schools. It also helped secure enough votes to put the bill over the top Friday after a three-hour debate.

Williams has proposed adding a surcharge to sales of lottery tickets and use of some sales taxes to fund the higher breeders’ incentives and purses without gambling. Friday, he took out the use of the sales taxes and said it relies on no money from the General Fund. That measure was packaged in the Senate budget committee with the funding authority legislation and economic incentives into one bill, the economic incentives bill passed earlier by the House. It passed unanimously, securing Democrats’ support as well as Republicans.

Minority Leader Ed Worley, D-Richmond, said while some Senate Democrats might prefer the House formula of slots at the tracks, they also favored the other two pieces of the bill – the funding authorities for projects like bridges over the Ohio River and the economic development incentives.

He said the choice was to say no to two-thirds of a bill they liked or to accept the one-third they did not and get the other two pieces passed.

The committee also inserted Beshear’s budget plan into the original House bill for the funding authorities, removing Beshear’s proposal to require state workers to give up holiday pay for some previously paid holidays.

That piece of Beshear’s plan is not popular in the House, but the Senate version Friday seems to remove that obstacle. The House has yet to take up the budget, planning to do so in committee Monday.

But with the House gone home and no slots bill in the Senate, once the Senate passed those two bills, everything stopped. Some House members had said Williams might adjourn the Senate and go home. But he said the Senate will return Monday.

However, if the House bill on slots at the tracks has not been delivered by then, he said, he’ll recommend the Senate adjourn sine die (Latin for without a future date). If the bill is there, he said, it will be assigned to the budget committee just as it was in the House. He said the House’s procedural maneuver costs taxpayers $60,000 a day while the Senate action Friday could have ended the session in the minimum five days.

Stumbo said in a statement the House “would have been glad to have worked through the weekend had the Seante asked to do so. We will return on Monday, looking forward to continuing the legislative process.

Williams said the House should abandon hopes for passing the gambling legislation, saying it can not pass this special session or any session in the near future.

“It’s time for us to sit down together and try to work this out, with the realization there’s not going to be any expansion of gambling,” Williams said.

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. The Richmond Register is a CNHI newspaper.