Casino backer to tweak bill for broader appeal

Revisions give Augusta, Columbus chance to compete for gambling.

The author of a bill to allow casino gambling in Georgia faces his first hearing on the measure today as he reworks the plan to garner more support.

State Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, will present Senate Bill 79 to the Senate Regulated Industries Committee at 1 p.m. While no vote is planned, the meeting represents the first time this year Beach’s plan could face critical questioning.

As written, the bill would allow for two casino “destination resorts:” One in a county with a population of more than 900,000 (only Fulton County qualifies) and one in a county with more than 250,000 residents.

In the version of the bill filed in January, 70 percent of the revenue generated from a 20 percent tax would go to the HOPE scholarship program, and the remaining 30 percent would support needs-based scholarships.

But today Beach will unveil changes he hopes will make his bill more palatable.

Requiring the second casino to be located in a county with at least 250,000 people was seen by many as a way for supporters to steer the casino to Savannah’s Chatham County. That annoyed lawmakers from Augusta and Columbus, who otherwise might support the bill but wanted their counties to have a chance to compete for a casino license, too.

Beach said he heard the complaints.

“We’ve changed that from a 250,000 population to 200,000, so Columbus has a chance and Augusta has a chance,” he said, adding that he will present a new version of the bill to the committee today.

Beach’s decision is a smart one, said state Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, the longest-serving member of the House and a top co-sponsor of House Bill 158, an identical House version of Beach’s bill.

“It’s more acceptable,” Smyre said of Beach’s revision. “We all know the main resort will be in the metro area, but economic development ought to spread throughout the state.”

Beach’s other tweak to the bill deals with how the proceeds would be spent. The revised version lowers the HOPE proceeds to 50 percent and would create a 20 percent pot to benefit rural health care.

Beach sees the casino proceeds as a way to inject new revenue into rural hospitals, which have been closing across Georgia in recent years.

But, while Beach and supporters say the two casino resorts would create thousands of jobs and produce tens of millions of dollars in new revenue, others warn such benefits are short-lived.

An April 2016 report from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York found that “state authorizations and promotions of gambling offer little longrun relief to state revenue problems.”

“New gambling activities may generate shortrun increases in public revenues,” the report says, “but these increases are getting smaller and their duration shorter, perhaps as more and more states compete for a limited pool of gambling dollars.”