Kurt Erickson’s article in last Friday’s Post-Dispatch should be a warning that the state’s control of casino gambling is in danger.
Erickson wrote that four of our professional sports teams are launching a petition campaign to legalize sports wagering, an issue the legislature has talked about for several years but has been unable to get out of its own way and approve.
The St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues, the Kansas City Royals, and the St. Louis City soccer club have filed nine proposed petitions with the Secretary of State. One of them will become the focus of a campaign to amend the constitution to allow sports wagering. The proposals also establish various tax rates and earmark revenues from sports wagering.
Some of the proposals will lower the overall tax on casino gambling by creating a super-low rate on sports wagering revenues. The proposals also change the way funds from gambling taxes are allocated.
Both are issues of legislative concern—-and of concern to educators in particular. Both are issues the legislature dealt with in the 1990s when casino gambling was first legalized. The earmarking of funds from casino gambling has been a legislative prerogative from the beginning. The legislature changed the earmarks once, moving portions of casino admission fees from support for early childhood education to support for nursing homes and cemetery development for Missouri veterans.
Legislative leaders need to protect the general assembly’s authority to determine the best interests of the people of Missouri—the people who send their representatives and senators to the capitol on their behalf.
The only way to do that is to approve sports wagering during the 2022 legislative session.
The BEST way to do that is to recognize that casino gambling laws enacted in the 1990s are no longer adequate thirty years later at a time when casino gambling as an industry and public access to casino gambling are changing.
Additionally, it is time the legislature recognize that the two-dollar admission fee established in 1993 has become a multi-million dollar liability to the state and to the casinos’ own host communities.
Proposed legislation has been written, but not introduced, that addresses all of those topics. One of the major provisions is increasing the admission fee to a contemporary amount that is the equivalent of 1993’s two dollars. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says the equivalent for this fiscal year is $3.67. A new estimate will be released in February, during the legislative session.
The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50, leaving seventeen cents unclaimed.
The proposed legislation increases the admission fee to $3.50. We know the casinos will vehemently oppose this provision because they like to keep a dollar-67 in 2021 dollars for every two 1993 dollars they give the state (which have a purchasing power of only a dollar and nine cents now). They’re happy getting richer and richer while the state gets poorer and poorer
The proposal leaves seventeen cents unclaimed. The filing of the possible petitions has prompted a suggestion for the remaining seventeen cents.
We know from past experience that the private owners of professional sports teams will expect the legislature to put up state taxpayer funds to help pay for a new stadium. The tub-thumping for a downtown Kansas City Royals stadium is well-underway, in fact. The state does not have the major funds the teams want it to commit without cutting funding for other state programs. A provision not yet in the suggested gambling reform bill could direct the unclaimed seventeen cents into a state fund for construction and renovation of professional athletic facilities, alleviating the inevitable pressure on the state for help with new professional facilities.
With wagering being permitted on sports, it is only proper that part of the proceeds from that activity be directed in that direction.
One reason sports wagering legislation has struggled and foundered in past legislative sessions is the effort to bring so-called grey-market gambling machines in convenience stores under state regulation. Efforts to make the two issues run in tandem have been counterproductive.
There is no doubt that it is important the state regulate those machines. But the stakes have been increased enough on sports wagering with the proposed petition campaign that the two issues should be separated and sports wagering should be a higher priority.
Nothing in what has been written today should be considered as opposing either sports wagering or regulation of the grey market convenience store machines. The author does not oppose either but does believe our gambling laws are outdated and are costing the programs the state once promised would be funded by those taxes and fees tens of millions of dollars a year.
The governor and the legislature have many issues to consider as priorities in the 2022 session. One of them is changing the law to make it harder to circulate petitions. We hope that issue will not obscure the importance of the sports wagering effort.
The proposed petition campaign should make state authority to regulate gaming and to appropriate the proceeds from it one of the major issues as a stand-alone matter that will not be endangered by other issues.