Huge campaign contributions to Co-Speaker Jim Black paid off in a big way for the video-poker industry Wednesday.

A stacked committee under Black's control steamrolled Senate efforts to ban video poker and forwarded a bill, instead, that creates the illusion of gambling reform.

The House Finance Committee replaced Senate-passed legislation banning video poker in the state with a counterfeit reform bill, and, in the process, most likely cemented the presence of the video poker industry here for at least two years. That's because the Senate will likely kill the House bill, meaning the General Assembly does nothing to stop growth of this highly addictive form of gambling.

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That's exactly what Black, recipient of tens of thousands of dollars in video-poker industry contributions over the past several years, wants. Black has sat on efforts to run the Senate's previous video-poker bans through the House. In May, he said he's worried about thousands of jobs that would be lost if the vile industry is shut down.

Federal agents have been investigating video poker, and a campaign-finance watchdog group has filed a complaint alleging numerous violations in the industry's $121,000 in contributions to Black. The state's sheriffs say that widespread illegal gambling centers on the machines.

Wednesday, Black stacked the Finance Committee with two new appointees to assure victory. And he sent his rules chairman, Edenton Democrat Rep. Bill Culpepper, to the finance committee to make sure that the chairman, Wilmington Republican Rep. Danny McComas, didn't allow proponents of the Senate bill a fair hearing. McComas and Culpepper did their jobs well in fashioning rulings that excluded the ban from consideration.

At key points, liberal legislators, many of whom oppose a lottery because it would prey on the poor, abandoned those concerns out of loyalty to their co-speaker. Liberal Democrats such as Durham's Paul Luebke, Cary's Jennifer Weiss, Chapel Hill's Joe Hackney and Winston-Salem's Larry Womble voted for the reform bill.

But so did conservative Republicans, the self-anointed guardians of "family values." With the lobbyist for the N.C. Family Policy Council begging them to reject the phony reform bill, Republican Reps. Julia Howard of Mocksville and Michael Decker of Walkertown voted with the gamblers. For Decker, it was just one more act of treachery to go on a long list of similar acts.

The video-poker industry knew it had to have some answer to the Senate legislation. So it cooked up phony reform. Their first bill would have provided huge amounts of cash to sheriffs to police the industry, with probably a little left over to buy other stuff for the sheriffs. The sheriffs didn't bite.

The industry hatched an alternative plan. The bill the committee approved provides for license fees that flow to Alcohol Law Enforcement (ALE), which would be responsible for administrative control of video-poker regulation.

There's no way that ALE, even with 20 new agents, can adequately police the machines, and the industry knows that.

The state's sheriffs said the House bill would be worse than current law. The county commissioners' association supported the sheriffs. But it didn't matter. Black has his campaign contributions. The industry got what it wanted: a stalemate in the legislature that guarantees it will continue to operate in North Carolina, preying on the poor and corrupting family values.

Source: Winston-Salem Journal