Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter says upcoming negotiations over gambling legislation present lawmakers with an opportunity they cannot afford to waste.
Representatives and senators will try to reconcile the differences in the comprehensive gambling plan the House passed in February and the scaled-back version the Senate sent back three weeks later.
On Thursday, the House rejected the Senate version and voted to send the two-bill package to a conference committee.
Ledbetter, giving an example of what he sees as the high stakes, noted that in Tennessee about 147,000 students received $450 million in scholarships from that state’s lottery, figures from the 2022-23 school year.
