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New York lawmakers and union casino workers are urging state officials to award three casino licenses in the New York City area sooner rather than later. The three would deliver a nice payday for the government in terms of license fees—upwards of $750 million per license.

“Issuing full gaming casino licenses downstate has moved to the top of my agenda,” said Gary Pretlow, chairman of the state Assembly Committee on Gaming and Wagering.

Pretlow sees Genting’s Resorts World gambling parlor at Aqueduct racetrack and MGM’s Empire City slots parlor at Yonkers Raceway winning two of the three as they already have facilities. They feature slot-style video lottery terminal games.

“They’re already up and running. They have the room to add table games and the resources to pay the license fee,” Pretlow said of the locations.

State Senator Joseph Addabbo opposes a Manhattan location because the borough already serves as a tourist hotspot with clubs, dining, and the Broadway theater district, according to the New York Post.

“With a smart, responsible approach to new casino licenses, we have the opportunity to put unemployed hospitality workers back to work while also giving our economy a much-needed boost,” said Rich Maroko, president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council Union. “What we need now is for our state leaders to step up and give us the tools to protect workers and create new employment opportunities.”

Resorts World at Aqueduct, which recently opened a hotel, said it’s eager to obtain a license to expand its casino operations to include table games like blackjack, baccarat, craps, and poker.

“Between the upcoming launch of our mobile sports platform and the potential for a full casino license in Queens, we couldn’t be more excited about the future of gaming in New York and the economic benefits it will bring people across the city and state,” Resorts World said in a statement.

Upstate New York has 11 casinos that offer slots, table games, sports betting, and a host of entertainment amenities. Seven are run by Indian nations, and four are private commercial casinos licensed by the state.

The closest casino to the city in New York state is the Resorts World Catskills Casino about 100 miles away. The three other commercial state-licensed casinos are Rivers Casino & Resort in Schenectady, del Lago Resort & Casino near Waterloo in the Finger Lakes and Tioga Downs in Nichols near Binghamton.

One gambling expert said the expansion of gambling to the New York City area would be a lucrative draw but could siphon revenues and players or even trigger closings of one or more of the upstate casinos, said Clyde Barrow, a political science professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

New York’s commercial gaming law, passed in 2013, authorized as many as seven land-based casinos with slot machines and table games. Four were allocated upstate, and those locations were given a 10-year monopoly on commercial casino gaming in New York to build their customer bases.

Even without the downstate casinos, the four upstate properties in New York have not been a success based on pre-opening forecasts. The shortfall has affected paying debt service at Resorts World and del Lago.

Putting it all together, Barrow thinks odds favor the end of at least one of the four once the New York City area casinos open. Upstate New York also has three tribal casinos and six VGT locations.

Along with the four commercial casinos, upstate New York is home to three tribal casinos.

“Casinos in the New York City area will do very well, that’s where the population is,” Barrow said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if one or two of the existing upstate facilities go out of business. Downstate New York is where the population is. But it’s almost inevitable that upstate casinos would close. It’s just a question of when and how.”

Las Vegas will host Super Bowl LVIII in 2024. To pull it all together, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) committed $40 million to the effort on January 11, the largest noncapital expenditure ever for the tourism body.

LVCVA President and CEO Steve Hill said the organizing committee hired Sam Joffray of New Orleans as the executive director and first employee. Joffray, senior vice president of the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation will relocate to Las Vegas and hire around 10 people in his first year and even more after 2023’s Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona.

The NFL’s championship game is scheduled for Feb. 11, 2024, at Allegiant Stadium. The economic impact could be more than $571 million with over 4,500 jobs created.

“Vegas is a platform for putting on major events like this and this city is great at it,” Hill said. “So, there’s plenty of time for us to get ready, and it is going to be a spectacular Super Bowl.”

The LVCVA approved up to $2.4 million to host the NFL draft in Las Vegas in April 2020, but the outbreak of Covid-19 postponed that party until this year.

The board also agreed to $1.75 million in July 2020 to host the 2022 Pro Bowl, which will be played at Allegiant Stadium on February 6.

The committee is expected to spend nearly $60 million for game preparations and will need to raise $20 million in additional funds to go with the $40 million provided by the LVCVA.

According to Hill, the city will spend around $55 million for preparations with around $6 million in contingency funds. The NFL will pick up anything over that.

Festivities leading up to the game last at least a week, including a Fab Fest, a media center, and media party; “Opening Night” and “NFL Honors” live television broadcasts; a live entertainment and concert series; corporate hospitality events; and other activities that will drive tourism to the city.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Hard Rock Sportsbook briefly held the state’s monopoly for sports betting, under the compact it negotiated with Governor Ron DeSantis. The compact also allowed the tribe to add craps and roulette to its existing casino operations and granted the tribe the option to add three casinos on its property in Broward County. In exchange, the Seminoles pledged to pay the state at least $2.5 billion over the first five years.

But on November 22, Federal Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the United States District Court invalidated the compact, citing the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Friedrich stated the proposed “hub-and-spoke” sports betting platform, which would process bets from gamblers statewide through computer servers on tribal property, was a “fiction.” The Seminoles appealed the federal judge’s ruling, and closed the Hard Rock Sportsbook platform.

Recently, DeSantis stated Friedrich’s decision to vacate the entire compact was unexpected. “We understood that that would be something that would be challenged, although I will tell you, we were not anticipating it to be a challenge under federal Indian gaming law. We thought the challenge would come under Amendment 3,” which requires voters, not lawmakers, to approve any gambling expansion. “But at a minimum, the compact was clearly negotiated with the understanding that the hub-and-spoke could be something that would run into trouble at some point and so was structured in a way to allow the compact to go forward.”

DeSantis continued, “You do not throw out the entire compact over this one issue. I think we’ll win on this issue eventually. So we’ll do what we need to do.”

Meanwhile, an initiative called the Florida Education Champions, funded with more than $37 million from DraftKings and FanDuel, is moving forward toward the 2022 ballot. It would make several sports betting licenses in Florida available to national sportsbooks, allowing online and in-person sports betting.

If supporters gather enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot and if voters pass the constitutional amendment, the legislature would then adopt legislation to implement licensure and regulation policies. Sports betting would launch in 2023, with revenue going to the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund of the Department of Education.

As of December 29, the Florida Division of Elections reported 240,000 petition signatures had been collected. The campaign needs 891,589 by February 1 for the initiative to appear on the 2022 ballot. Spokeswoman Christina Johnson said, “We are confident we will have enough signatures” to meet that deadline.

The Seminole Tribe has invested $20 million so far in an attempt to derail Florida Education Champions’ petition drives, in a multimedia campaign stating, “Don’t Sign the Gambling Petitions.”

Against these unresolved issues, DeSantis recently announced the first three members of the new five-member Gaming Control Commission that will take effect July 1, 2022. Named to the panel were: Department of Business and Professional Regulation Secretary Julie Imanuel Brown, who was named chairwoman of the commission; Office of Insurance Regulation Chief of Staff Michael Yaworksy; and former law enforcement officer Charles Drago. Each is subject to state Senate approval.

The commission will oversee tribal gaming compacts, parimutuel operators, cardrooms, slot parlors and other forms of gaming allowed by the state constitution, excluding the Florida Lottery.

The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts is reinvigorated by the news that the Biden administration has affirmed its status and that it can put land into trust in Taunton. But before continuing to build the casino it started years ago, the tribe wants to move cautiously, says its new Chairman Brian Weeden, who took office in May.

Last month the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior reversed the Trump administration’s order to try to take the tribal land out of trust. The 29-year-old Weeden, the youngest person to hold that post, says the tribe wants to look at the project with a new perspective, given how many years have gone by since the project was abandoned after a negative federal court ruling. Much of the gaming landscape has changed since 2016 when the tribe broke ground on the $1 billion casino resort, Casino First Light, which was to include a hotel, retail shopping, restaurants, a water park and entertainment venues.

The Bay State has three casinos, the Encore Boston Harbor, MGM Springfield and Plainridge Park slots parlor and the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe has started building a Class II casino on Martha’s Vineyard. Meanwhile, the legislature is considering legalizing sports betting.

Chairman Weeden told the Miami Herald, “We’re back to the drawing board, basically.” He added, “There’s still an appetite for gaming. It just needs to be a smart approach. It has to be different from the past. We need to learn from our mistakes and proceed with caution.”

At the same time, the anti-casino residents of Taunton, who won the round in federal court that shut down construction, have not given up. They have returned to federal court and argued again that the tribe wasn’t eligible to put land into trust because of the 2009 Carcieri v. Salazar ruling of the Supreme Court that says a tribe cannot put land into trust if it was recognized after 1934.

In their filing, they said, “The time for adjudication is now,” adding “Plaintiffs respectfully request this court to restore the administratively closed counts … and otherwise reopen the case to permit additional filings for adjudication.”

Despite historians recognizing that the Mashpees were the Indians that greeted the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth in 1620, the 3000-member tribe didn’t acquire federal recognition until 2007.

They also argue that a tribe shouldn’t have a reservation in two places separated by 50 miles: Taunton and Cape Cod. The tribe’s reservation includes 170 acres in Mashpee and 150 in Taunton.

As a result of the court decision, the federal government moved to take away the reservation. Until, in June 2020, another federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law.”

The Trump administration appealed but the Biden administration withdrew the appeal in 2021.

Despite the troubles that descended after the adverse court ruling, the tribe has maintained its relationship with the Genting Group—and recently renewed it. The tribe is in debt to Genting for $600 million, but the debt doesn’t come due until a casino begins operating.

Weeden said they are discussing a less grand slot parlor or bingo hall that would exempt it from 17 percent state taxes on gaming. They might also not take the gaming route, but try other enterprises, such as tax-free tobacco shops or tax-free gas stations, or marijuana shops. He told the Herald, “We need to exercise our sovereignty,” adding, “Casinos are just low-hanging fruit.”

At an upcoming tribal meeting, tribal leaders plan to present a plan for using $15 million from the federal stimulus bill and to pursue other funds from the recently passed $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill.

Wynn Resorts has told the Massachusetts Gaming Commission that it is rethinking its plans to develop land across the street from the Encore Boston Harbor in Everett.

The plans for an 1,800-seat entertainment venue, 20,000 square feet of dining and a parking garage with 2,200 spaces could be put on hold.

According to Gaming Commission’s Chief of Community Affairs Joe Delaney, Wynn “decided to pause the permitting process for this development so that they can do some reevaluation on whether the development as proposed is the best use for the site.”

The commission was looking at whether it has jurisdiction over non-casino developments near the casino. It postponed action until the development issue is clearer.

Delaney told commissioners, “Some issues came up with respect to whether it’s part of the gaming establishment or not—that has certain impacts on their development—as well as Covid and other things that they’re considering at this point in time,” Delaney said.

Encore said, “they will come back to us once this evaluation is complete and they have essentially a final proposal to move ahead with, whether it’s this one or with some minor or some major changes.”

Nevada casinos set a new record in November, reaping $1.32 billion in revenues. It was the ninth consecutive month that the state’s gaming halls pulled in $1 billion or more. November’s haul exceeded the $1.22 billion reported in October, and almost reached the record $1.36 billion figure set last July, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

The state’s current winning streak exceeded the previous record of eight straight billion-dollar months recorded from October 2006 to May 2007, board senior analyst Michael Lawton said.

Nevada sports betting also set records, reaping $72 million in November on wagers totaling $1.1 billion. As reported by the Associated Press, Lawton said the previous record was $61.8 million in sports bets in November 2020; he noted that sportsbooks took in more than $1 billion in wagers in consecutive months for the first time. Most sports wagers were made with mobile betting apps.

“The continued acceptance of mobile sports wagering by customers is driving these results,” Lawton said. “This month represented the highest monthly total recorded in mobile (bets) since the board began tracking these wagers in January 2020.”

Business is booming due to the return of leisure travel, including international travel from Canada and Mexico, as well the return of entertainment, sporting events and some conventions. The newly renamed Harry Reid International Airport reported passenger traffic almost equivalent to that seen in 2019. About 4 million people passed through the former McCarran International in November, down just 4.4 percent from the same month in 2019.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported 3.1 million visitors during the month, down 8 percent from 3.4 million in October. The regional tourism agency reported an average daily room rate of almost $156, up more than 15 percent from November 2019, according to the AP.

A surge in Covid-19 infections may throw a damper on the party atmosphere in months to come, however. Prior to New Year’s Eve, the Gaming Control Board promised that enforcement of mask mandates would “intensify” during the holiday, and reminded casinos and other gaming licensees that they could face disciplinary action if they fail to enforce Governor Steve Sisolak’s Emergency Directive 45. That directive requires face masks to be worn properly regardless of a person’s vaccination status. 

According to KLAS-TV, the last enforcement against a Las Vegas casino involved a $60,000 fine against the Mohegan Sun Casino at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas after it opened in early March of 2021.

In a statement, the board cited “another sharp increase in cases of Covid-19” in the state, and said, “all licensed locations subject to the mask requirement to ensure the safety of Nevada’s residents and visitors.”

Some 300,000 revelers visited the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown Vegas to ring in the New Year.

Commercial casinos across the U.S. generated revenues exceeding $44 billion for 2021, surpassing the record set in 2019 as pandemic-weary gamblers returned to casinos.

The pandemic shutdowns of 2020 had one positive effect: When casinos came back online, they generated record revenues.

According to a report in the Washington Post, commercial U.S. casinos generated more than $44 billion in revenues for 2021, crashing the previous record set in 2019, with an American Gaming Association spokesperson adding that not all numbers are in for November and December.

Nevada casinos were set to record their best year ever, with $12.3 billion in casino win registered through November. According to a report from the AGA, other winners were states like Colorado and Michigan, where brick-and-mortar gaming grew along with online betting boosted by legalized sports betting.

Nevada Gaming Control Board economist Michael Lawton told the Post that he expects 2021 to break the casino win record set in 2007, before the Great Recession. October marketed nine straight months of casino win exceeding $1 billion in the state, with the all0-time monthly record of $1.36 billion set in July.

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston may introduce legislation proposing a voter referendum to expand gambling beyond the state lottery. The catch is the bill would not define what types of gambling would be allowed. He said if voters approve the ballot issue, lawmakers then will determine how to move forward.

Ralston said, “There is an appetite this session that I haven’t seen before to do something. We’ve tripped over the details of this thing for years. Maybe it’s time that we asked the question of Georgians whether they want to expand gaming, and if they say yes, then we sit down and decide what form it will take, whether it’s going to be sports betting, whether you do horses or destination resorts.”

Longtime gambling opponent Governor Brian Kemp has stated if two-thirds of the legislature and a majority of Georgia voters support the idea, it will pass regardless of his stance. ” It doesn’t matter what I think if they pass a constitutional amendment,” Kemp said.

One drawback to Ralston’s expanded gambling is the timing. If a super-majority of legislators approve his proposal, a majority of voters would have to pass it in November. Then, developing a regulatory framework for whatever expansion would be included could take most of 2023. That means online sports betting most likely wouldn’t launch until late 2023 or early 2024, and that’s if all the moving parts come together quickly.

Lawmakers have sponsored bills to legalize casino gambling, parimutuel betting on horseracing and sports betting in Georgia every year for the last decade. Most of those bills would dedicate a portion of the proceeds to the HOPE Scholarship and pre-kindergarten programs.

Last year, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment that called for a statewide referendum to legalize sports betting, but it never reached the House floor. A coalition of the Atlanta Braves, Falcons, Hawks and Atlanta United announced they will be back this year to lobby lawmakers on behalf of the sports betting measure.

Richmond, Virginia 8th District Councilwoman Reva Trammell is sponsoring a measure that could lead to a second vote on the $565 million One Casino and Resort project, which local voters defeated 51 percent to 49 percent in November.

At the same time, state Senator Joe Morrissey announced he will propose a bill allowing Petersburg, 20 miles south of Richmond, to hold a casino referendum that would prevent a second Richmond referendum for five years.

The ballot measure vote, which failed by 1,500 votes, clearly was divided along racial and geographic lines, with voters in Richmond’s majority white precincts voting 2-to-1 against the project. Voters living closest to the proposed casino location in South Richmond overwhelmingly voted for it.

Morrissey supported the One Casino project, but he said allowing Richmond to vote again would be undemocratic, adding politicians and business leaders would be allowed to continue campaigning on an issue that has been settled.

“That’s not the democratic process. Reva Trammell should know better. I’m a little disappointed. I expected more from her,” Morrissey said.

In response, Trammell stated, “I’m doing what my people have asked me to do. I don’t know why Joe would say that. He knows how bad people wanted it.”

According to Trammell’s bill, city voters would vote on the same project, which would be built near the Phillip Morris manufacturing campus. It was proposed by Urban One and Peninsula Pacific Entertainment, owner and operator of Rosie’s Gaming Emporium and the Colonial Downs racetrack, who pledged to give the city $25 million if chosen. The plan was selected from among other proposals in a competitive bidding process last year.

Project supporters said the casino would provide significant economic benefits for the area, especially for the poor and minority families that live there. Opponents raised concerns about gambling addiction and whether the development would deliver all of its stated benefits, such as 1,500 new permanent jobs, $500 million in tax revenue over the next decade and financial support for city schools and community organizations.

Immediately following the referendum, Trammell began collecting signatures to hold another one and Morrissey began looking into how Petersburg, population 33,000, could hold a casino referendum. Previously, Morrissey and Petersburg officials said they have discussed a casino project with Urban One representatives, but it’s not clear if Urban One wants to try again so soon. Recently they said they will invite multiple proposals if state lawmakers allow the city to hold the referendum.

Following the November vote, Urban One Chief Executive Officer Alfred Liggins wrote an op-ed in the Richmond Free Press, commenting, “The state of Virginia has had a dismal track record when it comes to economic inclusion for African-Americans, especially as it pertains to the award of meaningful contracts and providing equal access to economic development opportunities to Black businesses. While this may be our history, it does not have to dictate our future. The Richmond casino license represents the last opportunity for Black inclusion in Virginia’s casino gambling gold rush.”