Editorial: Alabama wasting time and money on gambling issue

By: Editorial | Opelika Auburn News
Published: February 17, 2010

Can the State of Alabama please settle this gambling issue once and for all?

While state leaders bicker over the legality of electronic bingo machines at VictoryLand and other gaming centers, an estimated 400 Montgomery County school employees could face layoffs as projected funding looks bleak.

While state leaders argue over who should have the authority to investigate gambling operations — that means you, Gov. Bob Riley, and you, Alabama Attorney General Troy King — our state faces potentially the greatest budget crisis in years once federal stimulus funds run dry.

Does it really matter who wins this ego contest between King and the governor when our state doesn’t have enough money to fund education?

Does it really matter who wins this ego contest between an attorney general who hasn’t intervened in gambling investigations during his tenure in Montgomery and Riley — who has pretty much waited until the sunset of his eight-year stay in the governor’s mansion to take swats at the gaming industry — when money for prisons is running dry, unemployment is at a dangerous level and health care, primarily Medicaid, figures to doom whatever is left of the state’s wallet?

Let’s either call electronic bingo legal, or call it illegal. Now.

If necessary, let the residents of the state of Alabama vote on the issue. ASAP. If they want electronic bingo, they should have electronic bingo. If they don’t, then keep it outlawed. This is a democracy, right?

Let’s have a designated person in charge of cleaning up illegal activities, though we believed the attorney general was supposed to be that person from the get-go. His name shall be Troy King or John Tyson. Pick one. Now. Regardless of the 2006 election outcome.

From the raids, to the rallies on the capitol steps, to the deliberating in the Supreme Court, to the back-and-forth nasty letters between the governor and attorney general, to the new proposals in the Legislature to either regulate gambling, find a happy medium on gambling, or strip the power of Riley’s gambling task force, what’s happened is absolutely nothing good for the state of Alabama.

This issue is wasting our time, when more pressing matters in the Legislature should be resolved or discussed.

We’re arguing — and wasting precious and limited state tax dollars — whether or not grown adults should be allowed to play a game and pull a lever over and over again when the fate of money for public education in Alabama is in perpetual limbo.

Continued Montgomery politics on the matter is nothing but a losing bet.