Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 16, 1994 TAG: 9402160172
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
The marathon session - the last to consider House legislation before forwarding it to the Senate - began at 10 a.m. and lurched for more than 12 hours behind shades drawn against an untouchably blue winter sky.
Dozens of bills rose and fell, but the two big issues held sway - especially riverboat gambling, since it came first and colored everything after.
Northern Neck Democrat Tayloe Murphy, a bespectacled aristocrat with a bow tie and a lineage back to the Founding Fathers, launched a stammering but stiff-necked attack on riverboat gambling. He tried to amend the bill to keep gambling off the Rappahannock River and off the Chesapeake Bay north of Stingray Point.
Del. Vincent Callahan, a Republican from McLean, scoffed at Murphy's blue-blooded assault: "I'd like to again remind this legislature that Virginia was founded by cavaliers, and not Puritans. They drank hard whiskey. They gambled on cockfights. They drank their own brand of bourbon . . ."
Murphy's amendment was handily defeated, snuffing one major obstacle - genteel Virginia tradition - to the bill.
Other delegates, Republican and Democrat, offered modifications, and Democrat sponsor Jerrauld Jones of Norfolk was only too happy to accommodate most of them.
Those itches scratched, the bill seemed headed for approval. Except that most of those delegates who made the thing more to their liking voted against it anyway. To exclamations of disbelief, the bill failed, 55-42.
It certainly left teams of riverboat lobbyists looking pasty-faced. Jones rushed out to confab with them. House Speaker Thomas Moss, a Norfolk Democrat who supported the bill, hastily called a one-hour recess so his party could caucus and work out strategy.
Jones insisted that he opposed linking the riverboats to the bill borrowing about $140 million to finance roads for Disney's proposed theme park in Northern Virginia.
But after the recess, other riverboat supporters were hinting at doom for Disney. When Moss said that the Disney debate would have to be postponed because of errors in copies of the bills, it was Disney lobbyists' turn to look pasty-faced.
Jones was scurrying in and out of the chamber, consoling lobbyists and pressing other delegates for votes.
But Jones apparently rolled snake-eyes on his efforts to resuscitate the bill. It hadn't come up for another vote by a 10 p.m. recess, and Disney finally won approval by a vote of 93-6.
Keywords:
G.A. 1994
by CNB