Gambling sidesteps toughest Iowa issues

By Quad-City Times

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Iowa lawmakers have some serious studying to do. A gambling bill heading to the governor requires the head of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission to come up with a framework for regulating in-state online poker.

It also requires the Department of Public Health to assess the societal impacts of state online poker regulation.

We wish they'd started work on this assignment much, much earlier.

Iowa Lottery Director Terry Rich has been foreshadowing the need to legalize, regulate and tax a hugely popular, well established, but illegal online poker industry. Rich, in this newspaper, on Oct. 3, 2009, explained how federal legislation outlawing Internet poker hadn't been fully enforced, and suggesting a state role to assure online gambling complimented - not competed with - our Iowa gaming operators. He elaborated a year later in an interview published in Aug. 15, 2010.

But no action was taken. Then, on April 15, the U.S. attorney general indicted operators of the three largest online poker sites, effectively shutting down play for an estimated 10 million Americans.

So a huge market exists for the first state to figure out online poker regulation.

Yet, Iowa remains in the starting gate.

But lawmakers this year figured out a way to authorize online wagering on horse races, using a model quite similar to what Rich envisioned two years ago for poker.

Lawmakers were quick to find an online solution for a declining form of gaming with a limited audience. But they punted on regulation of a hugely popular form of online gaming.

We think they got it backwards. Let's hope this online poker study leads to a final exam in the form of online poker regulation sometime soon.

The same bill now on Gov. Terry Branstad's desk also takes voters further from their regulatory role on casinos. The bill reduces the frequency of county gaming referenda. Originally, counties needed to vote every eight years on sustaining a license. Now, the bill would suspend subsequent referenda for any county that approved gambling two times in a row.

A county where voters reject a license would have to wait eight years before another vote.

The Quad-Cities experiences with the Isle of Capri in Davenport should be enough to encourage the governor to veto this provision. Casinos need to be accountable to their communities and the referendum requirement every eight years didn't seem onerous. It simply reminds gaming license holders and operators who their bosses are.

The same bill makes no reference to smoking in casinos, an omission that should shame lawmakers. Three years after banning smoking for everyone else, lawmakers still seemed happy to cut a special deal for just one class of Iowans: casino owners.

We don't find them deserving of privilege over, for example, bowling alley owners, or tavern owners, or restaurant owners, or virtually any other private business owner. But that misses the main point. We know for certain that toxic secondhand smoke doesn't differentiate between the lungs of casino patrons or employees and anyone else. Iowans in casinos face the same health hazards that convinced lawmakers to ban smoking almost everywhere else.

Lawmakers bent over too far to accommodate casinos by reducing voter accountability, and sustaining the senseless, unhealthy, unfair smoking ban exclusion.

A Branstad veto should make them work a bit harder.

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