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Jefferson County — Birmingham: Electronic bingo gambling is coming to Birmingham officially in July, thanks to a little tweaking the City Council did to the city’s bingo ordinance June 2.
The retooled guidelines will make way for charity groups to operate electronic bingo machines as long as the groups have at least 500 of them, according to The Birmingham News.
Councilman Joel Montgomery, the author of the rewritten ordinance, believes charity electronic bingo could generate at least $60 million a year, according to ABC 33/40 News.
Montgomery said the new plan will help regulate electronic bingo and help the city cash in on money that surrounding areas are making, according to The Birmingham News.
The city will collect a fee of $100 per machine per month until January 2011, when a higher fee of $2,000 per machine per year will be instated, according to The Birmingham News.
The charity groups that run the machines will also have to pay 15 percent of their earnings to the Birmingham Board of Education beginning in January 2010.
Voting for the change were council members Montgomery, Johnathan Austin, Carol Duncan and Maxine Parker. Valerie Abbott voted against it.
Roderick Royal, Steven Hoyt and Carole Smitherman abstained from voting, according to The Birmingham News.
Governor’s Task Force on Illegal Gambling: David Barber, commander of the Governor’s Task Force on Illegal Gambling, said there are three bingo-related cases converging on the state Supreme Court rignt now — cases from White Hall, St. Clair County and Etowah County.
He said the task force is waiting to see how the rulings go in these cases but it has not necessarily “picked” one case as “the case.”
“It is not as easy as picking one case and putting it in front of the court,” Barber said. “The court works at its own pace … and we don’t have control over which issues the court is going to key into.”
He noted the court might deal with one or two of many issues in a case and those issues might not be the ones that will settle the overall issue statewide.
Barber noted attorneys on the electronic bingo gambling side are working hard on the cases. “It is just what you would expect when fighting that kind of money,” he said. For instance, the Bally machine company, which has “a good number of machines” in the White Hall facility, has attorneys helping in that case.
EDITOR’S NOTE — As a way to consistently monitor electronic bingo gambling issues across the state, The Alabama Baptist will provide updates such as these each week.
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