Two Longtime Foes Reach Agreement on Card Club Bill

Leading officials previously at odds over how best to regulate California’s card clubs announced Monday that they are joining forces to craft legislation aimed at placing the thriving industry under close state scrutiny for the first time.

Though seldom having seen eye-to-eye in the past, Senate leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) and Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren stood side by side at a Capitol news conference and unveiled proposed legislation that Lungren said would go a long way toward policing a freewheeling business in need of strong oversight.

Lungren said he and Lockyer, without fanfare, “have worked together for months, and we believe we’ve reached agreement on legislation to greatly improve state oversight regulation” of the state’s 239 card rooms and several others awaiting approval.

The Lockyer-Lungren axis appeared to give the legislation the best chance in four years of reaching the governor’s desk and being enacted into law because of the broad spectrum of legislative support that they expect.

However, Lungren said, “There’s always been an invisible hand in this sort of thing and Lord knows when it will come up again.”

Action at the clubs’ combined 1,954 tables--not counting Indian reservation gambling--churns over $8.4 billion a year in bets, more than all other legal forms of gambling combined.

Lungren has complained that he has only a few investigators to screen applicants for card room licenses and that follow-up monitoring is practically nonexistent, left principally to local authorities often beholden to the clubs for much of their tax revenues.

Under the new bill by Lockyer and supported by Lungren, state-level oversight would expand greatly. A Division of Gaming Control would be created within Lungren’s Department of Justice, consisting of 70 auditors and investigators just to check on card clubs, their owners and principal employees.

The Lockyer bill also would set up a part-time, three-member appellate board to hear appeals from card room operators who are cited for license violations by Lungren’s investigators. The board’s powers would fall far short of a full-blown, Nevada-style gaming control commission that had been proposed--and shot down--in previous attempts to enact state controls on card rooms.

The nonsalaried board now proposed, Lockyer said Monday, “avoids the creation of an unnecessary and expensive new bureaucracy.” The appeals board would be appointed by the governor and be subject to Senate confirmation.

The Lockyer bill also would extend from three to five years a moratorium that began Jan. 1 on the expansion of card clubs in California. Local elections to permit the clubs may not be resumed until the moratorium ends.

Rod Blonien, a lobbyist for the Commerce Casino in Commerce, said the industry for the most part has always favored some form of state oversight and knew that the day would come when fees would be assessed to pay for it.