Following up on an earlier blog post, Whitney Downard, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, has an article reporting that former Representative Sean Eberhart has plead guilty in a gambling corruption case. It looks like he was offered a salary of $350k plus an equity stake in a casino and, in return, he assisted with legislation that reduced casino transfer fees from $100 million to $20 million.
If I’m looking at the right bill, the legislative history of this thing is a little odd. HB 1015 went through the session as a fairly simple bill that expands on existing law making certain indemnity language in design contracts void. A minor change was made in the Senate and the House dissented from the changes. Then the conference committee bill comes along and turns a two page design contract bill into a 55 page gaming bill. The gaming language comes mostly from SB 552 which, before it died would have required a $50 million transfer fee. The legislative history for SB 552 indicates that it went to conference committee but I’m not seeing where any committee report was ever attempted. The conference committee process was always opaque to me, so I’m sure there is some kind of gambit I’m missing. But, off hand, I don’t know what advantage there would be to sticking everything into unrelated HB 1015 instead of just moving forward with SB 552. Nevertheless, that seems to be what happened. And HB 1015 is connected to the text quoted in Rep. Eberhart’s criminal case:
The Senate and House ultimately disagreed on portions of the bill, sending it to a conference committee that threatened to tank the bill. Eberhart, via text with an unnamed person, discussed a female lawmaker holding up the bill.
“… I’ve talked to her 3 different times. Told her I couldn’t believe she would let the bill die because of hold harmless language.
The original HB 1015 indemnity language seems to have been ditched from that bill and passed as part of SB 230 which contained similar if not identical indemnity language as the original HB 1015. I originally went down this rabbit hole to try to figure out if it offered clues as to who the “female lawmaker” holding up the bill because of hold harmless language; but there are too many twists and turns.
In any event, Eberhart seems to be looking at a probable sentence of three to four years, and it seems likely that other charges related to this effort will be unveiled at some point; but as of yet, no new names have surfaced.
Edit 12/04/2023: I appear to have been wrong about the “hold harmless” issue being related to the indemnity language in the original bill that served as a vehicle for the gambling legislation. According to this excellent article by Kayla Dwyer, that had to do with “language that required those relocated casino license holders to compensate Indiana communities that feared revenue loss from relocating casinos or increased competition.”
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