Mayors dismayed over lottery law veto

President Václav Klaus surprised many earlier this week when he vetoed an amendment to the Lottery Act that was intended to further regulate the gambling industry. What’s more, the timing of the veto, just after the dissolution of parliament, sends the bill back to the very beginning of the legislative process. Now parliamentarians and mayors from both the right and the left are upset over a long process for an important change going back to the drawing board.

The problem was this: if a municipality wanted done with slot machines, it was unable to prohibit them outright, because the operators would simply replace them with video lottery terminals, which could not be banned. The new amendment, which parliament passed several weeks ago, would have changed that, while also tackling other, deeper issues in the gaming industry. MP Jeroným Tejc of the centre-left Social Democratic Party was one of the authors of the bill.

“The other thing we wanted the law to change was the fact that the lottery companies, which are bound by law to pay fees to public service organisations, have been establishing their own foundations and civic associations, paying the fees into them, and then you couldn’t tell whether the money was actually going towards public service or getting lost in the operations of these companies.”

It was that fact that President Klaus cited as one of his reasons for rejecting the bill. Its ratification, he said, would take away the possibility of grants for schools hospitals, civic support centres, cultural institutions and more, even Czech representation in international sporting events, without offering any alternative source of income. The president’s veto asserts that the act was a pre-election ploy that moreover could lead to the misuse of bans in the interest of specific businesses and business interests. In short, the amendment offers more problems than it resolves.

Václav Klaus

Dalibor Blážek is only one of many mayors from across the country and the political spectrum who had been looking to the law to bring a major change to their communities. The Civic Democratic mayor of Aš says that, as a border town, Aš has an inordinate number of slot machines, and hence gamblers. For the last five years, his office has been engaged in what he called a bureaucratic war with the Ministry of Finance to limit the number of machines, and the president’s veto dashed what seemed to be certain victory. He says that he finds the president’s rationale “completely incomprehensible”.

“The president’s argument that the law would increase municipal corruption is laughable. In the municipalities bans are passed by the councils and can only be changed by the councils. In the ministry of finance this is done by one bureaucrat with a stamp – that is a chance for real corruption. In the towns, the councils, mayors and committees are under the scrutiny of their fellow citizens, and they’re not going to risk corruption.”

Key to the fate of the lottery bill now is the timing. With parliament dissolved after elections, Mr Klaus’ veto does not put the bill back into legislative circulation as usual, but shoots it down completely. Jeroným Tejc plans to reintroduce the bill again within the month:

“The process will take at least six months in the most optimistic scenario. It will depend on whether the parties that voted for it last time will keep their opinions even after elections. I fully believe that they will, and that a majority will stick to the fundamental things we compromised on.”