A year after he pushed a bill to eliminate wagering limits at card
rooms, state Sen. Dean Florez is seeking to loosen gambling laws some
more — this time with legislation that would make it easier to add
tables at small card rooms.
Florez, D-Shafter, says the change is needed to accommodate the growing popularity of Texas Hold’em.

The
card game is often featured on televised poker tournaments, spurring
many gamblers to try their hand at their local card room. It’s so
popular that many customers “have to wait several hours to play or
leave to go home and perhaps play poker on the Internet, which is
prohibited by federal law,” Florez said in the bill analysis.

Senate
Bill 152 has drawn less attention than last year’s wagering limit
measure, which anti-gambling groups strongly opposed. But activists are
still worried that the bill would further erode a 12-year-old
moratorium on card-room expansion.

The more gaming tables, the
worse it is for gambling addicts, said Fred Jones, a lawyer for the
California Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, an organization
representing mostly churches.

“You can’t give them the
temptation because almost by definition they cannot handle it,” he
said. “This continuous slide into more and more gambling is just going
to exacerbate that problem.”

Thanks to the Texas Hold’em craze,
card-room business is booming, even with competition from tribal
casinos, which operate under fewer restrictions.

Statewide,
card-room revenue grew each of the past four years, rising to $794
million last year, according to the state attorney general’s Division
of Gambling Control.

Still, smaller card rooms are having a
hard time because they can’t add tables, said Kermit Schayltz,
president of the Golden State Gaming Association, which represents card
rooms.

“You can’t expand your business,” said Schayltz, owner of
a small card room in a Sacramento suburb. Yet “costs go up year after
year after year. Give us a break.”

SB 152 applies to card rooms
that are prohibited by local ordinances from having more than 12
tables. About 60 of the state’s 91 card rooms could be affected. In the
central San Joaquin Valley, seven small card rooms would be covered by
the bill — in Tulare County, Madera, Porterville, Merced and Lemoore,
according to the Division of Gambling Control.

The bill would
allow cities and counties with card rooms to raise the limit on tables
by 45% at each room — allowing up to five more tables — without voter
approval. Today, local governments don’t need a vote to expand gaming
by 25% above the limit in place on Jan. 1, 1996.

SB 152 has passed the Senate and is expected to soon be taken up by the Assembly.

Fresno’s
Club One Casino would not be affected because it is allowed by the city
to operate 49 gaming tables. The six-table 500 Club in Clovis would not
be affected either because it can have up to 15 tables, according to
the division.

A state law enacted in 1995 prohibits new card
rooms and limits expansion at existing rooms. The moratorium has been
extended several times and is now set to expire in 2015. But over the
years, lawmakers have eased some of the restrictions.

Last year,
for instance, Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a Florez bill that allows
local governments to do away with wagering limits, freeing gamblers to
bet as much as they want on Texas Hold’em, Pai Gao and other games.
Fresno’s City Council quickly took advantage of the law, removing the
$200-per-bet Texas Hold’em limit at Club One.

Jones, the anti-gambling activist, accused the Legislature of bowing to pressure from card rooms.

“When
they rub up against [gambling limits], they simply change the law for
their own benefit,” he said. “You get these well-heeled [gaming]
interests paying off public officials.”

Florez is chairman of the
Senate Governmental Organization Committee, which oversees gaming
issues. Card rooms this year have contributed $12,000 to his campaign
account. Last year, a group of Los Angeles-area card rooms made a
$25,000 donation to an account that Florez uses to advocate against Los
Angeles County dumping treated sewage in Kern County.

Florez said
there is no connection between the donations and his bills. SB 152, he
said, is a “reasonable” way to make room for larger poker crowds
without allowing for a major gaming expansion.

“The best way to
keep growth under control is to make these very small modest changes to
the moratorium,” he said. “If you go from 12 tables to 16 that’s not
really that big of a deal.”

And, he added, local governments would still have to approve any increase.

Even
so, Jones said the bill “undermines the ability of voters to be able to
control the expansion of gambling in their communities.”

A report
last year by the California Research Bureau questioned the ability of
locally elected officials to regulate card rooms because some small
cities are dependent on card rooms as a major source of revenue –
mostly from locally negotiated taxes.

One of those small cities,
Colma in the Bay Area, was behind last year’s effort to do away with
wagering limits. Card room revenue accounted for about a third of the
1,500-population town’s budget, according to a 2005-06 budget
projection.

Small towns in the Valley are less dependent on
gaming revenue because none have larger card rooms. For instance, The
Mint, a three-table card room in Porterville, pays the city $150 per
table per quarter. That comes to $1,800 a year, a tiny fraction of the
city’s $21 million general fund budget.

Recovered from the Poker Players Alliance archive index. This is the archived item as preserved.