The House of Representatives turned down Thursday a plan to allow a truck stop to continue offering video poker if a survey dispute finds it is located in gambling-free Lafayette Parish.
The House of Representatives turned down Thursday a plan to allow a truck stop to continue offering video poker if a survey dispute finds it is located in gambling-free Lafayette Parish.
The House voted 46-46 on Senate bill 859 by Sen. Craig Romero, D-New Iberia, which effectively kills it because House bills require at least 53 votes to pass, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the bill is dead if Rep. Sydnie Mae Durand, D-Parks, who handled it in the House, can change some votes and get some of the 11 absent representatives to support a motion to revive it.
Durand said she and Romero would review the voting tally and see who they might talk to about the bill to drum up more support. If they can get more than half of the membership to support such a move, they could breathe new life into it.
Durand got enough votes to approve an amendment that guaranteed all revenue from the poker machines would continue to go to St. Martin Parish.
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Romero said he did not urge the amendment because “it’s not an issue about money. It’s about a business person who made an investment and might lose it.”
The bill was filed in response to a recent survey that throws into question the original 1897 boundary lines separating Lafayette from Vermilion, St. Martin and Iberia parishes.
Durand said the developer of the Food-N-Fun Truck Stop “invested in good faith” and built it on property that at the time was undisputedly in St. Martin Parish, where voters welcomed gambling.
Making the owner give up video poker machines because the business might be in Lafayette Parish “is bad business to invite these people there and then kick them out when it’s not their fault,” she said.
Rep. Charles DeWitt, D-Lecompte, said the state shouldn’t make exceptions, especially when a revised survey found that some people in his area had built their house on state property and they had to move.
Lawmakers split over the issue of allowing a video poker establishment to operate in the parish.
Source: Mike Hasten, The Lafayette Daily Advertiser
