To backstop her many constituents who don't want casino boats plying Georgetown County waters, S.C. Rep. Vida Miller proposed last week that the S.C. General Assembly ban the vessels. If Miller, D-Pawleys Island, could pull off a ban for all six coastal counties, that would be a wonderful thing.

Her quest, however, seems destined to fail. Senate President Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, fears a ban could deter large cruise ships with gambling rooms from visiting his city. As Miller acknowledged last week, the House has passed similar bills before - and watched them wither in the Senate for lack of consideration.

A more fruitful approach would be to empower coastal county councils to ban the boats. Three years ago, McConnell himself suggested that as an alternative to a state ban. So the Senate well might go along on a local-option bill.

More important, a local-option law would help Georgetown County Council, which is embroiled in a legal dispute over the casino boat ban members enacted in 2002. Georgetown Circuit Judge Jackson Gregory last year ruled that state home rule law doesn't give County Council such authority.

That council appealed to the S.C. Supreme Court. The justices well might overrule Gregory and decree that home rule law does allow County Council to keep gambling away from the Murrells Inlet and Georgetown waterfronts.

But the justices probably won't decide the matter until next year - a long time for both the council and plaintiff Wallace Cheves to wait. Cheves is the Greenville businessman who has a Murrells Inlet boat slip all lined up against the day he gets the legal green light to commence gambling cruises.

If the General Assembly clarified home rule law on this issue, the council and Cheves would have their answer. Murrells Inlet residents could stop worrying that gambling traffic would disrupt the easy pace of of life on their waterfront.

Such a clarification also would smoke out Horry County Council, which has played Hamlet on this issue. The council passed a ban on second reading three years ago but never moved it on final action.

More recently, Councilman Harold Worley has proposed that county government profit from two boats plying the sucker trade out of Little River. Worley, who once professed to oppose the boats, now says the council should charge each gambler who boards them a fee. The council has not yet ruled out this bad idea.

What's wrong with the boats, which some residents enjoy visiting? No government authority checks the backgrounds of the owner, monitors the honesty of the games or sets the conditions under which they operate. No other form of gambling in this country enjoys such lack of oversight.

Only Congress can fix this problem. But federal law does allow the states to keep the boats away. Since our state government won't do that job itself, legislators should pass the responsibility downhill to willing counties. To continue to leave coastal counties helpless against casino boats would be wrong.