House tightens controls in charity gambling bill
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The House further amended the bill to limit charitable gambling events in one location to two per month; as it came out of the Senate, the bill said two per week at any given site.
The House debated the bill and 48 amendments for 2 1/2 hours before deferring final action until Thursday.
The most spirited debate was over Rep. Frank Buck’s proposal to require that 25 percent of gross proceeds go to the charity.
“I’m as sincere as I can be in suggesting to you the professional gamblers already know everything in this bill,” said Buck, D-Dowelltown. “If I’m in the advertising or printing business and want to suck all the profits out of the charitable gambling business I can, and the charity gets nothing — that’s reality.”
Buck insisted that without requiring some percentage to stay with the charity, they could — and some would— end up with nothing.
“We’re dealing with crooks,” Buck said, referring often to the Rocky Top gambling scandal that rocked the state in the late 1980s. “You don’t write the law for the good people. The history of this is they will cheat, and they’ll do it again if you don’t have some control. If you think this won’t happen you’re not living in the real world.”
The bill sponsor, Rep. Harry Tindell, D-Knoxville, argued that the original bill would send all proceeds to the sponsoring charity after expenses, and he said the expenses were carefully defined.
But Buck’s argument carried the day in several procedural votes; Tindell eventually relented after the percentage was reduced from 35 to 25.
On the issue of background checks for the board members and employees of the charity who will be handling the money from a gambling event, the House at first made them mandatory. It later put them at the discretion of the Secretary of State.
The House also stripped out a provision the Senate had added to allow St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis to raffle off houses in several different places on the same day. Under the House version no one could hold more than one event per year, and it has to be in one place.
The House version of the bill also sets a limit of total prize money for any single event at $250,000, excluding real estate.
An annual charity gambling event for 501(c)3 organizations was part of the constitutional amendment voters approved in November 2002, which also allowed the state lottery.
The House adopted several other amendments tightening control over the money, such as limiting the amount of miscellaneous expenses to $5,000, down from $7,500.
The House version also shifted the investigative and enforcement authority for the events to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, as opposed to the Secretary of State’s office. The Secretary of State still will receive and process the applications.
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Read House bill 3250 at:
Tennessee General Assembly, http://www.legislature.state.tn.us/