The author of a bill to allow casino gambling in Georgia faces his first hearing on the measure Thursday as he reworks the plan to garner more support.
Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, will present Senate Bill 79 to the Senate Regulated Industries Committee Thursday at 1. While no vote is planned, the meeting represents the first time Beach's plan has faced critical questioning this year.
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 to needs-based scholarships.
But Beach on Thursday 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 Columbus and Augusta, 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 Thursday.
Beach's decision is a smart one, Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, the longest-serving member of the House and a the top co-sponsor of House Bill 158, an identical House version of Beach's bill.
“That would be a lot better,” Smyre said of Beach’s revision. “It’s more acceptable. 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 are spent. The revised version lowers the HOPE proceeds to 50 percent and creates 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 the State University of New York found that "state authorizations and promotions of gambling offer little long-run relief to state revenue problems. New gambling activities may generate short-run increases in public revenues, but these increases are getting smaller and their duration shorter, perhaps as more and more states compete for a limited pool of gambling dollars."
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