Backers of State Gambling Controls Hope 3rd Try Is the Charm : Regulation: Atty. Gen. Lungren and allies again seek to create gaming commission to monitor card rooms.

Hoping for better luck this time, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren and his lawmaker allies Tuesday laid out their latest plan to regulate California’s growing gambling habit, an effort that so far has consistently failed in the face of powerful opposition.

The centerpiece of this year’s campaign, like unsuccessful attempts last year and the year before, is to create a five-member gaming commission that would closely monitor the hundreds of card rooms in the state, some so large that they rival in players and income the big casinos in neighboring Nevada.

The commission would screen applicants for new card rooms and impose uniform state licensing practices on an industry now overseen only at the city or county level, frequently by governing bodies reluctant to get tough on card rooms that they depend on for revenues.

Lungren told a Capitol news conference that the card rooms tend to be a major draw for criminal elements, from the potential of takeover by organized crime to offenses reported to his office that include “extortion, murder-for-hire schemes, kidnaping, loan-sharking, armed robbery, follow-home robberies, credit card fraud, forgery, tax evasion and embezzlement.”

Citing the “explosive growth of gambling, primarily card rooms,” Lungren said he and a bipartisan team of legislators are more hopeful this year of winning enactment of an independent statewide gambling commission to license and regulate the state’s more than 250 card rooms. Besides setting up the appointed commission with the power to grant, revoke or deny gaming licenses, the legislation supported by Lungren and his allies would greatly expand the attorney general’s gambling investigation unit.

In place of three auditors in Lungren’s office who now look over gambling house books, a 70-member Division of Gambling Enforcement would be set up to do audits, conduct background checks on gambling proprietor applicants and carry out investigations assigned by the commission.

Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento), who helped lead the fight for similar gaming controls last year and is again one of its leading proponents, said he expected smoother sailing for the proposal in this legislative session. In prior years, the debates consisted of “yelling, screaming and hollering,” he said. Now, “the (proponents’) coalition is broader . . . and anyone with half a brain (who) sees $8.4 billion floating across the (gaming) tables of this state completely unregulated” should agree that regulation is needed.

Isenberg, reminded that bitter fighting between Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) over the power of making appointments to the proposed commission killed the legislation last year, said this year would be different.

“The partisan balance in the Assembly has changed and the power of the Speaker is no longer what it once was,” Isenberg said, referring to the 39-39 major party split in the lower house and Brown’s lesser authority as Speaker. A bill with popular support, Isenberg said, can no longer be killed “simply by procedural moves.” But he added that the gambling measure “will be the hardest fought issue of the legislative session.”

Aides to Lungren said they expect some elements of the industry to lobby against state control. But they said operators of many of the larger card rooms are not opposed and some welcome orderly, uniform regulation.