Wednesday's bingo hearing

In all honesty, I sat Wednesday morning at the Jefferson County Courthouse at another bingo hearing under Circuit Judge Robert Vance impressed with his abilities but getting very little immediate results out of the hearing.

Essentially, Bill Adair, the lawyer for the Sheriff's Department, wanted an order to put a halt to the practice of allowing bingo charities to be repermitted to keep moving to new bingo halls as it would delay the case further. Allowing charities to move around presents new opportunities to have amendments to the original case as to who are defendants and where, which delays the case. He said there was no way to manage this if the suit had to repeatedly be amended with new bingo halls. He said it would be understandable if a bingo hall burned down or flooded, for example, but that some changes have been made as soon as a week after moving to another hall.

Adair said a bidding war for charities had gone on, and there has been at least one accusation of intimidation involved to get a charity. (As bingo charities lawyer Herbie Brewer pointed out, you need about 14 charities to operate 24/6 based on the hour limitations for one charity.) Adair went on to call it a "pyramid scheme." He also went on to tell about one bingo hall that didn't have any charities, and, once found out, came up with names in a matter of hours, some of which officials had never heard of.

Brewer said there are lots of ways charities can operate their own games, including one bingo house to allow several under one roof.

"They can certainly have other people do it for them," Brewer said.

Eventually an order may come later this week, but we had to sit through a number of other arguments that touched on just about everything else about the case. We even got into the matter of whether the charities can get together and contract with a third party to operate the games...which Adair said, in his opinion, they cannot.

"I think the intent of the law is that the permit holders must operate the games," Adair said.

A number of arguments were offered up that serve as interesting points. One is that Judge Jerry Selman's original temporary restraining order on new permits has never been made permanent, thus making that order suspect as far as current standing. It was pointed out the TRO came as everyone thought a resolution would come quickly. Brewer even gently urged the judge not to consider legislating rules from the bench -- although it was also agreed that the commission had few rules out, and Adair said that the commission might have even rescinded some past rules for the March 2008 rules it passed -- then failed to take them back on when they cancelled the March rules.

Brewer also raised the idea of filing a motion to stay the whole proceeding if Gov. Bob Riley's new gambling task force performs criminal investigations. On that, Vance saw the point of possibly infringing on Fifth Amendment rights if information is sought that could go back to a criminal case.

There was also discussion about a proposed protective order against disclosing information from documents. The judge noted the idea that media might try to intervene to claim state record laws, and attorney Charlie Waits, an attorney for the Walker County Political Accountability Coalition (which, as disclosure, recently has been one of my private clients) spoke up saying the group had indicated it wanted copies of the charity applications.

However, it was interesting everyone seemed to discuss getting to the main questions, which are: Is electronic bingo legal, and are current machines permissible, or are they slot machines? Now that the vending machines are close to being put on the suit, Vance hopes to move on with inspection of the machines so he can answer the main questions. He also seemed to look for ways to speed up the process, although he admitted that might involve more unfair speculation if not all the machines are alike. He warned to get the facts needed will still take some time.

In all, we didn't get much done except to air out positions Wednesday, although we got some hope that the judge wants to move on to the main points. He also seemed fair in dealing with both sides. But I hope he has some patience, because this still could take a while.