A last-minute public hearing in the Alabama Senate Tourism committee Wednesday afternoon became a racially and politically charged event that ended with no vote — in part because one committee member made clear that he would not vote on a new or amended version of the expanded gambling bill that has stalled in the chamber. v2q48
The meeting was called to consider don’t have enough to get past their first Senate committee stop.
“Is there any reason our caucus was excluded from this hearing?” asked Sen. Roger Smitherman, who is Black. “We don’t have a representative here. Are you going to do this without us? … We need to be in the middle of this germinating and be a part of it. Why would people think that we would anything that we are not part of?”
The hearing started 23 minutes late when the committee finally had a quorum, and once the meeting was called to order, it was clear that some believed that having a hearing was a just a ploy to buy time. Some were so angry at the process and games being played by bill sponsors that they had no plan to seriously consider any proposal.
“I have not seen anything … and if anything happens, I will move to table it. And if it comes to a vote, I will be a no,” said Sen. Andrew Jones. “This is not how you run good government when a bill that is 130-140 pages long that nobody has seen and people are working behind the scenes and we’re expected to vote on it. Are you kidding?”
‘This is just a little baby sham’ 5v1n40
As chairman Randy Price prepared to start the hearing, Jones asked if he would consider limiting public comment to one minute, instead of three. Price said he’d prefer to give the traditional three minutes to the half a dozen people signed up to testify.
“I just don’t want to give people time to finish putting something together that we haven’t seen and get up and try to ram it out with a quorum,” Jones said.
Said Smitherman: “It’s hard to know what they are even going to talk about. This is just like a little baby sham, they just up here talking, expressing themselves while they back there putting together whatever they are using to do it.”
Legislators were pressured by leadership to gambling bill – Alabama Gazette https://t.co/ObBHVh5pgg
— Brandon Moseley (@Brandon05697225) February 28, 2024
Lobbyists from the Alabama Farmers Federation, Alabama Policy Institute, and others testified against the bill, in general saying that an expansion of gambling would not “curtail” the illegal gambling already going on in the state and that it “hurts families and weakens communities.” A representative from the Poarch Band of Creek Indians testified that the tribe “can only a bill that is based on the business principles that we know work. As the bill stands now we do have concerns.
“We cannot a bill that does not take basic business economics into consideration.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Kimberly Cook, a Vestavia Hills City Council member, testified against the bills, and also was the first person in the room explicitly say that a substitute bill was coming. But she also expressed her anger and frustration at the process.
“This is nuts, and it’s not right,” Cook said. “It’s not right for the people to not know what is in a bill before it gets dropped and before it gets voted on the next day.”
Bill sponsor: It’s our job to find a compromise 1i4r2g
In the end, bill sponsor Sen. Greg Albritton agreed, though he said that despite the tenor of the hearing, he believes he has enough votes to move a proposal.
“I agree … we should not vote on anything we have not seen, and we’re not going to,” Albritton said. “Looking around, I think we have the votes, maybe, Mr. Chair, to what we have out of committee today.
“I’m tempted to do something along those lines. However, I know that there have been hours of work trying to find a solution so that we can find a path to a workable bill that’s comprehensive in nature, that will resolve the issues, that will gives us the caps, the controls, and the collections of revenues that we need here in Alabama so that we don’t have a rampant wild west out there, so we can actually enforce and regulate as we should.”
Gov. Kay Ivey told reporters Tuesday that she is planning to meet with legislative leaders Tuesday to discuss the gambling package that ed the Alabama House of Representatives earlier this month. https://t.co/RQeX9WqsRv
— F. Steven DiMasi (@FSDiMasi) February 28, 2024
Albritton went on to say that he knew that a new substitute — that was different from a previous version — was being prepared, and made a motion to hold over HB 151 and HB 152 until the latest iteration of the bill was available.
“We’ve got to have cooperation and compromise on both sides,” Albritton said. “We cannot have separate people and individuals running through and running over. I’ve given up the opportunity today to run this bill through, I want that recognition and I want the other side … to come to the table and compromise and to work with (us) to meet the needs that have been specified by these people in other discussions.
“We cannot this bill on a one-party system. We cannot this bill on an overthrow or overrunning of another. We’ve got to come together. That’s what our job is.”
