New Mexico has a complex gaming past. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico might be one of the states to get on the American Indian casino craze. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the situation.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King assembled a task force in Nineteen Ninety to create a compact with New Mexico American Indian tribes. When the panel arrived at an agreement with 2 prominent local bands a year later, the Governor refused to sign the bargain. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took office in Nineteen Ninety Five, it seemed that Indian wagering in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when the new Governor signed the compact with the Indian bands, anti-gambling groups were able to hold the accord up in the courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the accord, therefore denying the state of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees over the next several years.
It required the Compact Negotiation Act, passed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full contract between the State of New Mexico and its American Indian tribes. A decade had been burned for gaming in New Mexico, which includes American Indian casino Bingo.
The non-profit Bingo business has gotten bigger since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. That year, New Mexico not for profit game owners brought in just $3,048. That climbed to $725,150 in 2000, and exceeded one million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have grown steadily since that time. Two Thousand and Five witnessed the largest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.
Bingo is apparently favored in New Mexico. All kinds of owners try for a piece of the pie. Hopefully, the politicos are through batting around gambling as a key matter like they did back in the 1990’s. That is without doubt wishful thinking.
This entry was posted on January 27, 2010, 3:21 pm and is filed under Casino. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.