BUDGET UPDATE

HARRRISBURG _ A state House panel has advanced one vision of how Pennsylvania might legalize table Slot_Machine_Queen games at the state’s slot-machine casinos, setting the stage for a likely clash with the state Senate.

The House Gaming Oversight Committee voted 14-11 along party lines on Friday afternoon to send a table games bill to the full House for consideration. The language authorizing the new games was amended into an already-approved Senate bill calling for reforms to the state’s five-year-old gaming law.

After nearly three hours of grueling debate, the committee signed off on legislation allowing casinos to install up to 200 table games that would taxed at a rate of 34 percent. License fees for the games would be based on a casino’s classification under the gambling law. So-called “resort” casino operators would pay a $7.5 million fee. Free-standing casinos and casinos at horse-tracks would have to pay $20 million.

Under that structure, the games would net the state $62 million this year and $247 million in subsequent years. The up-front licensing fees would net $255 million, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Dante Santoni, D-Berks, said.

A competing Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Robert M. Tomlinson, R-Bucks, calls for a 12 percent tax rate and a $10 million licensing fee. It would create an estimated 10,000 jobs.

That bill is now before the Senate’s Community, Economic and Recreational Development Committee, and could be called up for a vote before the full Senate soon, Tomlinson aide Fran Cleaver said.

Tomlinson’s bill is preferred by the casino industry, which has claimed that high tax rates would make it unprofitable for them to operate the labor-intensive table games.

“The current House proposal is a non-starter,” said David La Torre, the Harrisburg spokesman for the Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Washington County. “It’s unfortunate. If this were to pass, it would lead to the loss of thousands of jobs across Pennsylvania.

Right now, The Meadows employs 1,000 people and boasts 3,700 slot machines. La Torre said the casino operators are prepared to install 65 table games, creating an additional 700 jobs.

But a “high tax rate makes that financially impossible,” La Torre said.

Officials at the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem, meanwhile, say they plan to offer 80 to 100 table games for poker, blackjack, roulette and craps by April 1 once lawmakers make them legal.

The Friday vote on table games came over objections from the committee’s Republican members, who complained that they hadn’t had enough time to review a nearly 100-page amendment offered by Rep. Florindo J. Fabrizio, D-Erie.

Rep. Curt Schroder, the panel’s ranking Republican, also decried what he described as the “lingering stench” surrounding the state’s current gaming law, which was passed in the early hours of the morning in 2004.

“We need to take a lesson from history, slow the process down and wait another 24 hours before we vote this bill,” said Schroder, R-Chester, who offered an ultimately failed motion to delay consideration of the bill for 24 hours.

Denied their procedural tack, Republicans ventured into the weeds on the fine print of the reform proposals in the bill, including the elimination of language barring Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board members from earning income outside the state jobs.

Rep. Mike Vereb, R-Montgomery, one of the Legislature’s most outspoken gaming reform advocates, complained about what he described as watered-down reform provisions in the legislation.

Vereb had intended to offer an amendment requiring that the gaming board’s internal investigators report the results of their background checks to the state Attorney General’s Office instead of to the gaming board.

In an interview after the meeting, Vereb said he hoped to reach an agreement on his proposal with House and Senate leaders to include his proposal in the bill. If that effort failed, Vereb said he planned to offer his amendment during floor debate on the bill.

“I am optimistic that I can sit down and have a conversation,” he said.