Category Archives: gambling

The Jontay Thing

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Just as Monday’s entry was being written came news of the tragedy of Jontay Porter, the Columbia kid, ex-MU Tiger, fringe NBA player who is the first person permanently banned from the NBA since Jack Molinas was banned 71 years ago for betting on games he played with the Fort Wayne (now Detroit) Pistons.

The Porter case is of special interest not only because of his Missouri roots but also because Missourians might be deciding whether sports betting should be legalized in our state—and what that might mean to the confidence we have in our big-time sports teams and their games.

Alex Kirschner, writing for Slate.com says Porter “did things worse than anything Pete Rose ever got up to.”

Jeff Zilgitt of USA TODAY was equally unforgiving when he wrote, “In all of Jontay Porter’s idiocy, he provided a service to other professional athletes who might consider placing bets on games in which they are direct participants or in which they have insider knowledge to provide to gamblers. It’s almost impossible to pull it off in a world of legal, regulated and monitored gambling. It’s even more impossible when you’re as blatant as the NBA says Porter was.”

Kirschner  notes that sports leagues “make a lot of money off of people betting on their games…It’s a cash grab, yes.  But from the leagues’ perspective, it’s also a payment in exchange for tolerating certain risks. Sports leagues profit from betting but they are also terrified of it.” 

 Porter, he says, committed two sins and flirted with a third.  He disclosed privileged information to bettors and manipulated in-game outcomes. In Porter’s case, he took himself out of a game early so he would not meet projected performance levels.  The third circumstance that terrifies leagues, says Kirschner is outright throwing of games. “The single easiest way to threaten a league’s multibillion-dollar business is for people to doubt that they’re watching a game left to chance…If that goes, everything could go.

Porter is only 24 years old. Kirschner says his career is in the dumpster because he has been involved in the biggest betting scandal involving a player since sports wagering was legalized in this country in 2018. “If the Black Sox were a 10 on the scandal scale,” he writes, “Porter probably is a 6 or 7.”

Zilgitt darkly predicts this will happen again. “Someone always thinks they can beat the system, and maybe someone can but not Jontay Porter and his simple attempt at trying to make extra money. It’s inevitable, just as it was inevitable it happened in the first place.” Porter, who has spent most of his pro career in the NBA’s minor league, was being paid $410,000 this year to play for the NBA’s Toronto Raptors. The league investigation says he made $22,000 on the bets he placed on the game from which he removed himself, claiming illness.

The “idiocy” that Ziglitt attributes to Porter is explained by Kirschner who writes that the kid used the gambling companies that partner with the pro leagues to place his bets—-and those bets are monitored by the leagues. “If Porter were collaborating with underground bettors and bookies, his activity would have gone undetected,” he wrote.

In Kirschner’s view, pro sports teams are just asking for this kind of problem.  Sports wagering companies are aggressively advertising their “services,” leading to greatly expanding participation in betting. He bluntly observes, “A bigger pool of bettors means a bigger pool of potential crooks. In a subtle but real way, the NBA courted the Porter scandal.”

Pro sports leagues fought against sports wagering until the U. S. Supreme Court legalized it nationwide in 2018.  Once it was legalized, the leagues had no choice but to get in bed with the betting industry.  Pessimists might be forgiven for wondering if they’ll stay on their separate sides of the bed.

And whose reputation is damaged by this scandal?  Not the gaming industry.  It’s sports and those who play them.  A player has been banished for life. Pro sports worries whether its fans think its product is genuine and honest.

Zilgitt quotes NBA Commissioner Adam Silver saying the Porter case “raises important questions about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players.” Zilgitt notes Silver has advocated federal regulation of sports wagering and suggests outlawing or limiting certain kinds of bets.

Not considered by either columnist is what role state regulatory agencies can play or should play in terms of disciplinary actions against casinos that handle such bets or wagering companies that process them. In this case, the hammer has fallen on the player, deservedly so, but those who took, paid, and processed his bets appear to be facing no penalties.

Missouri’s pro sports teams are gathering signatures to get a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment legalizing sports wagering.

The proposal mirrors bills introduced in this year’s legislative session that grievously disadvantage the state and the programs that rely on gambling income for their budgets.  The Missouri Gaming Commission has warned that the legislation pushed at the Capitol by gaming interests does not raise enough revenue for the commission to adequately regulate sports wagering. Nor does it do anything to punish the betting industry that produced the measley $22,000 that Porter won.

“Measley,” as in how little he gained compared to how much he has thrown away.

The Porter scandal is a tragedy for him and for sports in general.  How will Missouri voters see the issue now that one of our own has become a self-induced victim of a system we are being asked to approve?  He might be the first but nobody expects he will be the last.

If Missourians approve the proposition, will they also undermine trust in the games that they love?  How many Porters are needed before we wonder about every missed free throw, every error, every missed tackle, every overthrown pass, every wide shot on goal?

(If you want to read the full articles on which we’ve based two entries):

Jontay Porter NBA betting scheme is a lesson in stupidity (usatoday.com)

Athletes beware: Jontay Porter NBA betting scheme is a lesson in stupidity (msn.com)

The Stadium Thing

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Here’s a sand-in-the-underwear situation for you.

Owners of our big-time sports teams—the Royals, the Chiefs, the Blues and the Cardinals (and our two pro soccer teams)—want you and me to reach into our pockets to pay major parts of the costs of building new stadia or upgrading old ones for them.

The Royals and the Chiefs overlooked a critical issue as their effort to extend the Jackson County sports tax was trounced by voters recently. The Cardinals are overlooking the same issue with reports that they will be seeking state support for the updating of Busch Stadium III (although team president Bill DeWitt III says such a report is “premature.” :

None of them has mentioned how many millions of dollars they will make from sports wagering. None of them has given any indication that they could use that money instead of taxpayer funds for their new projects.

It is a failing that might not bode well for the teams and the casinos that want to put a sports wagering proposition on the ballot later this year, a proposal that hugely disadvantages the state and the programs that years ago the casinos promised could be funded with taxes and fees from legalized gambling.

Would it not make sense to ease voter worries about city and state subsidies for stadium construction and improvements if the teams committed to using the first few years of the giant profits they expect from sports betting for their stadium projects instead of expecting a tax handout from the citizens?  

 Why should the legislature give any team that will profit from sports betting any funds from state taxpayer pockets?  Why should the legislature lessen financial support for, say, mental health services, veterans homes, education, senior services programs, and nursing home support so sports teams that soon will be divvying up hundreds of millions of dollars a year from people thinking they can consistently beat game-day odds don’t have to use those funds?

Opponents of sports wagering might be able to make a lot of hay out of this oversight by the teams and the casinos.  It’s an election year. If you are a voter, you should ask your candidates if they favor taking money away from state programs to build or maintain playing fields while the team owners and the casinos rake hundreds of millions of dollars in lost consumer bets into their pockets instead of investing them in stadium projects in their home cities?

You should ask those questions.  And if your candidate says the sports teams should be allowed to pick your pocket with a tax while lining their pockets with gambling revenues, you should look for another square on the ballot to fill in.

These two issues are joined at the hip and voters, especially those in the home areas of our major league teams, should hold their legislators and their sports teams accountable.

 

How Our Major League Sports Teams Are Plotting A Massive Rip-off Of The State 

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

Most of our patrons do not read the Tuesday entries that focus on sports. We ask that you carefully read this one, however, at least the first part.

(SPORTS WAGERING PETITION)—-Our six major league sports teams have crawled into bed with an industry whose sole characteristic is greed and the people of Missouri could become their abused children.

The teams, fed up that the legislature has failed to legalize sports betting, have launched a petition campaign highly favorable to the casino industry and detrimental to the public to put the issue on the ballot.

It’s a rip-off of major league proportions.  The Cardinals, Royals, Chiefs, Blues, and Missouri’s two major league soccer teams are collecting petition signatures to ask voters to let them and our thirteen casinos pocket millions of dollars with a sweetheart tax package that will take millions away from Missouri schools, veterans, and even the host cities of the casinos.

Hidden in the deal is a big tax cut for the casino industry that is made bigger with provisions that lower the amount of money to be taxed.

The petition campaign constitutes nothing less than a mugging of the state of Missouri.

Let’s begin with a simple question.  Would you knowingly bet eleven dollars, knowing that the most you ever could win would be TEN dollars?

That is what the teams and the casinos are going to do to Missourians.  The state is guaranteed to be a loser with the very first bet.  Here is how it will work if voters fall for this scheme:

Missouri’s casinos pay a twenty-one percent tax on revenues remaining after they have paid off winners of bets.  So much money is bet in Missouri that the casinos have approached revenues of two-billion dollars in each of the last two years and are on track to equal last year’s record or set a new revenue record for a third straight year.

Simple elementary school mathematics shows how the teams’ casino allies will grow immensely wealthy with this scam while the things that are supposed to be financed with the gambling tax are massively short-changed.

The proposed tax rate on sports betting is only ten percent, eleven percentage points below the rate charged for the last thirty years of casino gambling on table games and slot machines. Thus, the state would give up eleven of the present twenty-one percentage points to get ten

The American Gaming Association’s latest annual report says Missouri would be the twelfth state with a tax of ten percent or less.  Fourteen states have tax rates above ten percent or that top out above ten percent, including three states that charge fifty and fifty-one percent. Only five states on the AGA’s chart show rates of less than ten percent.

But there is something dark behind the petition’s demand that the rate be ten percent here.

Ten percent and twenty-one percent produce an average of 15.5 percent, an effective twenty-five percent tax cut for all Missouri casino gambling.

While the teams’ sophisticated advertising campaign will tell voters the proposal wll generate millions of dollars more for the state education fund and for their host cities, the truth is that it will produce less.

Financial analysts who advise the Missouri General Assembly forecast taxable revenes from casino gambing will jump from almost two billion dollars to $2.4 billion within four years.  A twenty-one percent tax of that amount would produce $504 million with ninety percent going into funding for elementary and secondary public schools. The other ten percent would be distributed to the thirteen cities that have casinos in them and to one county that shares revenues with the casino city.  An average tax of 15.5% would produce $372 million, again with the 90-10 split, $132 million less than if the twenty-one percent tax is maintained.

While $372 million dollars on the low end might seem to be an impressive sum, here is something else the casinos and the sports teams will never tell you in their promotions and advertising:

The Missouri Gaming Commission reports that casinos in the last fiscal year paid gambling taxes of $403.3 million dollars on revenues from slot machines and table games alone.

Approving sports wagering as proposed in the petition will take more than thirty million dollars away from the state, not add revenue.

Our metropolitan areas will feel the difference most acutely.  Host communities in the St. Louis metro area, which has four casinos, will lose $5.6 million in the first four years of sports wagering under the petition plan.  We wonder if Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III, who has been the spokesman for the teams during legislative committee hearings, has ever thought of what this plan will cost his main ticket-buying community.

Host communities in the Kansas City metro area, also with four casinos, will lose $3.65 million, something we bet the Chiefs and the Royals haven’t considered. .

Our figures are based on projections made by legislative fiscal analysts.

Legislative fiscal analysts forecast the ten percent tax will cost the thirteen host cities more than eleven million dollars, total, in the first four years of wagering, money they would receive if sports wagering were taxed at the same rate as slots and table games.  Amazingly, the association that represents those cities doesn’t seem to care. It has endorsed whatever the casinos have asked for from the legislature. One wonders if the city councils or the citizens of those communities has ever heard how much they have lost in the past thirty years because the two-dollar admission never having adjusted for inflation and how much they will lose if the petition passes.

By our calculations, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual inflation calculator, the state already has lost almost $1.1 Billion in admission fees because casinos are paying the same fee they paid when the first two of them opened thirty years ago this year.

In the most recent fiscal year, the state received $57.9 million in admission fees. Had the fees been adjusted annally for inflation, it would have received $113.5 million. But inflation works both ways.  The $57.9 million the state did receive had a purchasing power of only $29.5 millon because of the loss of purchasing power of the two 1993 dollars. Remember, half of the two-dollar admission fee goes to the host cities.  But their association doesn’t seem to care.

And it’s worse.

Buried within the petition are six deductions not allowed in today’s law that will reduce taxable income by several millions of dollars. The deductions encourage casino bookeepers to try to show their casino produced a monthly loss on paper.  If they can, the schools, home dock cities and other state entities listed as beneficiaries of this new form of gambling will receive zero revenues that month.

But it’s far worse than that.

If a casino can show that it had a paper loss for a month, the amount it claims as loss will carry over to the next month and be used to calculate that month’s profit or loss, again reducing the casino’s tax payments. Can anyone name any other business or industry in Missouri that is allowed to calculate their taxes this way?

Two states provide scary examples of the dangers of the carryovers for Missourians to consider.  In November, 2022, Louisiana casinos reported a statewide loss of $25.6 milllion because some of the casinos took bets made by a Texas furniture store owner that the Texas Rangers would win the World Series, which they did. In the same month, Maryland casinos reported a statewide loss of $33.6 million after they spent more than $60 million in promotional credits as part of the state’s launch of mobile betting.

But it’s far worse than that.

Let’s go back to the admission fee. Casinos also pay the state a two-dollar admission fee for each person who goes through the turnstiles to the gambling floors. If the gamblers stay longer than two hours, the casino pays another two dollars—a policy that began on the first day that casinos opened thirty years ago this year when they actually were boats and river cruises actually were possible.

A prediction was made at the East Coast Gaming Conference in 2019, a few months after sports betting was legalized by the U. S. Supreme Court, that within five to ten years, ninety percent of sports wagers would be placed online. Just two years later, gambling analyst Larry Henry reported on Casino.org that more than eighty percent of sports bets already were being placed online and New Jersey, the first state to legalize sports betting after the court ruling, 92 percent of sports wagers had been placed online in 2021.

If Missouri follows national trends, ninety percent of sports bets soon will be online and not made by people who go through the turnstiles of our casinos.  Under the petition, those online bets will produce zero revenue for programs and services whose budgets have suffered greatly because turnstile admissions have declined by about forty-seven percent in the last twelve years.

Who is suffering the most? The Veterans Commission Capital Trust Fund, which provides money for veterans nursing homes. Admission fee funding of care for our veterans has dropped by 63 percent in the last decade.  Nothing in the petition does anything to reverse that trend.

The Missouri Gaming Commission’s budget has declined by more than twenty percent in the last decade. It has twenty-three fewer employees than it had then. And it is facing a major increase in enforcement responsibility if the petition passes. The commission will collect some licensing fees but the petition also requires it to use some of its new money to pay for a problem gambler’s assistance fund.

Numerous studies have indicated gambling addiction will at least triple with the introduction of sports wagering and remote betting.  The money to be set aside for “compulsive gambing prevention” comes out of the commission’s pocket. It comes out of the taxes benefitting schools and home dock cities and fees going to the gaming commission. Nothing in the petition requires the casinos or the teams to contribute directly to a fund to counter the problems their new form of gambling will create.

And two more things before we go.

The casino industry has spent a lot of time and resources trying to convince your legislators and mine that sports wagering is a stand-alone issue that need special care and feeding.  It is not.  Their own bills just add “sports wagering” to the list of games of skill in our state laws.  In the now-seven years that sports wagering bills have been introduced, not one has said anything that defines sports wagering as differing from poker, blackjack, craps, or any other table game or slot machine.  A bet is a bet is a bet.  And if you bet long enough the casino will have all of your money whether you bet on the spin of a wheel, the fall of a card, the roll of a die, or the pull of a lever.

The committee backing the petition campaign says sports wagering will provide new good-paying jobs.

Will it generate enough new jobs to replace the 5,600 people laid off in the host cities during the last fifteen years?  Will it replace the $100 million-plus in payrolls lost each year by the host cities in that same period?

Everybody loses except the teams and the casinos in this petition campaign. People going into casinos know they’re playing on tables tilted against them. That’s fine.  But before Missourians support this blatant deception against our state by the casinos and our sports teams, they should look at how much they will lose regardless of whether they gamble.

The casinos have never dealt the top card on the deck to the legislature while trying to convince it to approve sports wagering.  Now they, with their sports team bedmates, are doing the same with the general public.

The legislature could fix all of this during this session. But don’t expect it to. There are 197 state representatives and senators in our General Assembly.  The Associated Press has reported that casinos, sports teams, online sports betting companies, and video gaming terminal inerests have hired about eighty lobbyists to pressure the people we presume represent us into representing those interests instead. That’s one lobbyist for ever 2.5 members of our legislature. It is hard to grow a backbone and do what is right on this issue when  you are surrounded by lobbyists backed by interests with bottomless checking accounts and a willingness to support re-election bids or to support opponents for those with the courage to reject the ongoing mugging of Missouri.

The only recourse Missourians will have if this petition gets enough signatures to be on the ballot later this year is to vote it down.  If they fail to do so, their state will be a big loser.

(All of the statistics used in this entry are drawn from the annual reports of the Missouri Gaming Commission, the American Gaming Association, legislative staff fiscal notes for pro-casino legislation, and the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We never have seen the homework the casinos to justify the claims they have made in the past or the present).

Now, we take a look at the history behind a cold football game, a cold-shooting basketball team, and the latest from baseball’s hot stove league)

(CHIEFS)—The regular season wasn’t pretty for the Kansas City Chiefs but they looked almost as solid as the frozen field at Arrowhead Stadium Saturday night with their dominating 26-7 wild card playoff win over the Miami Dolphins, a team that hasn’t won in forever  in cold weather.

The game goes into the record books as the fourth-coldest game in NFL history.  Here’s where it fits in:

December 31, 1967  Lambeau Field, Green Bay comes from behind to beat Dallas 21-17 on the famous Bart Starr quarterback sneak behind center Ken Bowman and Right Guard Jerry Kramer who pushed Defensive Tackle Jethro Pugh aside just enough for Starr to cross the line.  Temperatur at the start of the game: -13. Wind Chill  -48. The game was dubbed “The Ice Bowl.”  Green Bay went on to defeat the Oakland Raiders 33-10 in Super Bowl II.

January 10, 1982  “The Freezer Bowl”  Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati. Coach Forrest Gregg, who played in “The Ice Bowl” is now the coach of the Bengals, who beat the San Diego Chargers 27-7. San Diego’s only touchdown was scored by former Missouri Tiger Kellen Winslow.  Game time temperature: -9  Wind Chill -59.  Some of the players in this game, as in the Green Bay-Dallas game reported health problems for the rest of their lives because of the playing conditions.

January 10, 2016  TCF Bank Stadium, Minneapolis. Seattle beats the Vikings 10-9 when Bill Walsh’s field goal attempt goes wide left with 22 seconds on the clock. Minus-6 with a windchilll of minus-25.

January 13, 2024 Arrowhead Stadium,  Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins in the southernmost NFL cold game on record, 26-7. Harrison Butker’s four field goals and two extra points outscore the Dolphins, who lost their eighth straight game played in below-freezing temperatures. Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa dropped to 0-5 in games played below 45 degrees.  Game time temperature: -4  Windchill -20. At the end it was -9 and -28. The extreme cold sent 69 people to aid tents run by the city fire department. About half were for hypothermia symptoms and fifteen people were taken to hospitals where seven were suffering from hypothermia, three for frostbite and five for various other reasons.

      The game broke the record for the coldest game at Arrowhead Stadium.  The Chiefs beat the Broncos 48-17 on December 18, 1993. Footall Reference reports the temperature at the start of the game was 0.5 degrees.

December 10, 1972  Metropolitan Stadium, Minneapolis Green Bay 23, Vikings 7. Temperature at game start 0. Wind Chill -18. Green Bay’s running backs, John Brockington and MacArthur Lane combine for more than 200 yards rushing, 99 by Lane, who had come over from the St. Louis Cardinals that year. Later, Lane was with the Kansas City Chiefs and in his last year in his career, 1978, rushed for 144 yards against  the Bills. He was 36 years and 199 days old and remains the oldest player to rush for more than 100 yards in an NFL game.

January 20, 2008  Lambeau Field  New York Giants 23 Packers 20 on a 47-yard field goal 12:25 into overtime by Lawrence Tynes. Temperature -4, Wind Chill -24.

December 26, 1993  Lambeau Field  Packers vs. the now-LA Raiders. Packers win 28-0. Game time temperature 0, Wind Chill -22.

January 15, 1994  Ralph Wilson Stadium, Buffalo, Coldest game played at Orchard Park in Buffalo. Game start temperature 0, Wind Chill -32. Bills come from behind in the fourth quarter with a fourth quarter touchdown pass from Jim Kelly to Bill Brooks to win 29-23.

December 3, 1972  Metropolitan Stadium, Minneapolis. -2 at the start with a windchilll of -26. Vikings kicker Fred Cox outscores the Bears with three field goals and two PATs in a 23-10 Minnesota victory.

Kansas City’s defense again was dominant, keeping the Dolphins out of the red zone all night long.  Miami’s only score was a 53-yard touchdown pass and run to former chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill who otherwise was not a factor in the game. The win against Miami moves the Chiefs into next week’s game against the Buffalo Bills, who beat the Pittsburgh Steelers last night in the game delayed for a day because of a typical Buffalo winter storm that dumped more snow into the stadium than an army of scoopers could remove on Sunday.

(miz)—The Missouri Tigers reached the halfway point of their regular season Saturday, losing their sixth game in their last seven outings and could drop below .500 tonight when they play league-leading Alabama on the Crimson Tide’s court.  Alabama is 11-5 overall with a five-game winning streak. Missouri is now 8-8. The Tigers join Arkansas and Vanderbilt in the SEC cellar with 0-3 records.

SB Nation’s Sam Snelling reports the Tigers have not defeated a high major opponent since losing Caleb Grill early in December with an injury to his non-shooting wrist. He had surgery  and might be back later this month.

Snelling suggests coach Dennis Gates is giving his veteran players a chance to right the ship, but it’s not working. Five of his guys have played more than 100 games in their college careers with Nick Honor accounting for 139. Noah Carter, John Tonje, Connor Vanover, and Sean East II all have more than 100 games. He wonders when Gates will realize his veterans aren’t getting the job done and when he will start building for tomorrow with his younger guys. (zou)

(BASEBALL)—No big new signings by the Royals and the Cardinals but the Redbirds have made an interesting front office move by hiring Chaim Bloom as an advisor. Bloom was with the Boston Red Sox until he was dumped by Fenway Sports Group despite being credited by some with cutting spending while rebuilding the team’s farm system.

He’ll be an advisor to Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak, who plans to step aside after the 2025 season, prompting questions about whether Mozeliak is grooming his successor. Mozeliak warns against jumping to conclusions. “where it leads to, we’ll see,” he says.

It’s the second major advisory step taken in the off-season by the Cardinals, who signed Yadiar Molina earlier as an advisor, prompting speculation about his role growing from advisor to manager.  Molina is managing in the Puerto Rico winer league and wants to manage in the bigs.  Present Cardinals manager Oli Marmol is in the last year of his contract. Mozeliak does not expect friction between the M’s.  Although he’s a supporter of Marmol, he also recognizes the Cardinals cannot have another year with problems on the field and in the locker room.

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Passive 

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Maybe it’s a case of thinking the old days were better than today.  Maybe not.

The legislature has returned to the Capitol.  Most people have no idea how quickly things move when the session starts or how intense the work is—or how contentious is can become if a partisan renegade group decides it must prevail, their minority status be damned.

For the last three years the sessions’ last week or so have become mired in political mud and the sessions have been the least productive in long, long memory because of conflicts between the legalization of those Video Lottery Machines that are pimples in our convenience stores and sports wagering legislation that seeks to give our casino a significant tax break to the detriment of our education funds and even to the further detriment of their own host cities.

But that’s a diatribe for another time.

It seems to from our high position that the baneful effects of term limits, about which we were warned in 1992, have produced another regrettable trend.

A passive legislature.

The loss of institutional memory because of term limits cannot be overstated.

One of the bigget warnings before 1992 was that term imits would transfer power from the chambers to the hallways, where lobbyists roam, because no senior members would be around to advise newcomers on the role of the General Assembly in the process of lawmaking and in the process of shaping state fiscal policy.

The transfer became obvious several years ago when, during debate, the sponsor of a bill would ask of another lawmaker proposing an amendment, “Have you checked with so-and-so out in the hall?”

Later the issue became even more egregious as I watched lawmakers during debate checking their cell phones for text messages from the paid influencers outside the chamber. Lobbyists are banned from being on the House and Senate floors. Physically.  But their electronic presence is undeniable.

As we have watched for these many years, it seems that the legislature today is more likely to accept legislation without question and without hearing the voice of the public as much as it once did. Although we don’t cover committee meetings as much as we did in our reporting days, we have been in a large number of them on the issue of sports wagering, a special interest of ours for several reasons.

The caisno industry, now unfortunately aided and abetted by our major professional sports teams that need millons of dollars a year to try to keep pace with bigger-market moneybag teams, has always presented bills that are—to be frank—terrible fiscal policy for the state and its people and especially for schools, veterans, and the casino’s home cities.

Glaringly absent is any aggressive interrogation of the industry.  I can recall only two instances in which any semi-extensive questions were asked and only one when the questions were aggressively put (and the industry’s response was hardly direct).

In the old days—and I intensely dislike using that phrase—it seemed the legislature, while heavily influenced by lobbyists (who have a place in the system) and their checkbooks, looked more critically at legislation.  And it seems that lawmakers who were more likely to be presented a problem took an initiative, now missing, to fix the problem.

Many legislative hearings where held at night so members of the public could more easily be present without missing a full day of work. Night meetings are scarce today, leaving the field more and more to those who can affort to buy representation.  The voice of the citizen is muted in today’s system and the general assembly is more susceptible to being influenced by political action committee money.

In the first year of my lobbying career (working on getting the casinos to pay to keep the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Missouri), I took some findings of casino greed to a member of the House who told me, “Oh, the casinos will be interested in this. I’ve already gotten two checks form them this year.” He apparently was totally unaware of what a self-indictment his statement was.

Some legislator’s offices are festooned with plaques from organizations thanking them for their support.  When I was running the Missorinet newsroom we had a rule that we would accept no awards from any organization we covered.

We were not their friend. Nor were we their enemy.

We are one of those in the halls again this year, raising our pitiful voice against the steamroller called the casino industry, hoping again that we will trouble the consciences of those who sit quietly while the industry presents its plans for getting richer and richer while the services that serve the people of Missouri that rely on revenue from the industry get poorer and poorer, and poorer still under proposed sports wagering legislation.

Somebody has to ask the questions.  Too bad it isn’t the people who are presented with bills the industry wants passed.

We Weren’t Good Enough for Trump. Or Was It The Other Way Around? 

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Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the first legal casinos in Missouri.

The industry has done well in those thirty years.  It has posted revenues of almost $42-Billion.

For a time, Donald Trump wanted to be part of that, making some deals that would add to his casino empire back east. Before he started sniffing around in Missouri he had bought a casino from Hilton Hotels in 1985 and opened the property as Trump’s Castle Hotel Casino (later Trump Marina) in Atlantic City.  In 1986, he bought out a Holiday Inn and opened it as the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

Two years later he got involved in the Taj Mahal project in Atlantic City and, using junk bonds,   turned it into a billion-dollar construction project.

In 1993, a year after voters approved riverboat gambling, he showed up in Missouri, ready to deal.  St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley didn’t want to cut a deal unless riverfront gambling interests got behind downtown redevelopment, a condition that Trump didn’t seem to mind, telling reporters, “Depending  on what he wants, I would be interested in discussing possible linkage. I think St. Louis needs a convention center hotel very badly. St. Louis is certainly a good gaming market.”

Already displaying the modesty to which we are accustomed, he proclaimed in May of ’93, “I think I know as much about convention halls as anyone in the public of private sector.”

While he was casting eyes at Missouri, he was feuding with Native Americans who were opening their own casinos.  The same year he looked at St. Louis he was ripping the operators of the Foxwoods Casino operated by he Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in New York, telling New York City radio host Don Imus, “I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up reservations…I think if you’ve ever been up there,  you would truly say these are not Indians.”

(Just for the record, Donald Trump has zero Indian blood. His grandfather, came here as a 16-year old barber to escape three years of German military service. The legality of his entrance to the United States is questionable.)

American Indian Republic later reflected, “His discourteous rhetoric involving American Indians has often been used to both demean and frustrate those to which such speech was directed, with his early 1990’s tirades reflecting his discontent with the rapid and expansive rise of Indian gaming in particular. Much of the racially influenced remarks that had occurred during that period would later be conveyed once again during his 2016 presidential bid against his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton, amongst other politicians.”

The year he was considering a Missouri casino, he filed a lawsuit against the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that allowed Indian nations to open casinos. His whine was a familiar one to us today. The suit claimed those casinos were providing unfair competition, that the act was discriminatory as well as being unconstitutional.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, a defendant, reacted, “My initial reaction was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve never even met Marla Maples. How can he be suing me?’ It is really absurd to think that a self-proclaimed tycoon s threatened by a few bands of impoverished Indians. It’s the theatre of the absurd.”

(Marla Maples was Trump’s new hobby at the time.  They had met in 1984 and started carrying on while he was still married to Ivana, who finally split with him in 1990.  It was about the time he was fighting Indians that Marla was trying to convince him to marry her.  She said they’d set the date “about a dozen times” but he always had “a little freak out” the day before the grand event. She said she helped him get over “that fear monster,” but had started taking her wedding gown along on their travels because “you’ve got to be prepared.”  They married late in 1993, two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. Three years later, Trump fired his bodyguard after police reported finding him under a lifeguard stand with Ivana on a deserted beach at 4 a.m. They divorced in June of 1999.  By then he was fooling around with a Yugoslavian-born model, Melanija Knavs, who was building a career in New York. They were married in 2005.)

Getting back to our story:

As usually seems to happen with Trump lawsuits, the one involving Bruce Babbit went nowhere.

Later that year, representatives of the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma proposed building an 80,000 square foot casino/hotel/theatre/restaurant complex in the St. Louis suburb of Arnold.  One Arnold resident dismissed the idea, commenting, “Trump is in town talking about a deal on the riverfront. Who in the world is going to choose Arnold when downtown St. Louis is 20 minutes away?”  Governor Carnahan’s deputy chief of staff, Roy Temple, indicated Carnahan was cool to the idea of a casino in Arnold, generally opposed to casinos beyond those allowed by the riverboat gambling amendment added to the State Constitution in ’92.

Trump also was crosswise with Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker, claiming he couldn’t build a casino in that state until Weiker left office because Weiker opposed casinos. Weiker responded, “My opposition to casinos isn’t just casinos. It’s opposition to Donald Trump,” who he referred to as a “dirt bag” and a “bigot.”  Trump displayed his now-familiar brand of logic when he fired back that Weiker “is a fat slob who couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Connecticut,” ignoring the fact that Weiker had gotten elected to an office of somewhat greater importance.

In November of ’93, Trump unveiled his plan for a $300 million floating casino and 20-acre development just north of Laclede’s Landing on the St. Louis riverfront.  Five other developers also were eyeing the area.

In February of 1994, he floated the idea of a $98 million casino project in St. Charles that included a golf course, aquarium, and a park. Six other companies were competing.

Trump wasn’t good enough for either project.

In August of ’95, he left some people shaking their heads when he filed a lawsuit in New York to stop the introduction of  new lottery game, Quick Draw. He described it as “video crack,” and argued, “When you add it all up, the social costs far outweigh the potential tax revenues” and would be harmful to gambling addicts and casual gamblers “who can lose far more than they can afford.”

The same concerns did not apply to his own casinos because, “The overwhelming number of people who go to casinos do so for limited periods of time and with set budgets.”

By now, by the way, the Palm Beach, Florida, town council had capitulated in the face of a lawsuit filed by Trump and approved his proposal to turn his historic Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club. The council had refused to allow the change two years earlier and Trump had, well, you know.

Trump’s grandiose plans for St. Louis and St. Charles were stillborn but he wasn’t done with Missouri.

In 1995 he established Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts as a publicly-traded company.  Four years later THCR agreed to buy the troubled Flamingo Hilton Casino in Kansas City, reportedly for $15 million.  The city port authority approved the deal on Trump’s 53rd birthday. But the deal fell through when the Missouri Gaming Commission refused to approve the company’s gaming license, expressing concerns about the THCR’s $1.8 Billion in debts.

The summer before the deal, the Hilton had agreed to pay $665,000 in fines and penalties to the federal government instead of going to trial in federal court  for “providing financial incentives” to friends of the then-chairman of the Kansas City Port Authority in return for his political support to build the casino on city-owned land. The company always denied doing anything improper.  The gaming commission threatened to yank the Hilton’s gambling license unless it sold its property.  Hilton had spent more than $100 million to develop the site.

In September of ’99, Station Casinos bought the Flamingo Hilton at the fire-sale price of $22.5 million. A Trump spokesman said the deal was cancelled so the company could focus on operating its three casinos in Atlantic City and reduce its debt.

Anyone wanting to learn more about all of this little drama seems to be out of luck.  The Associated Press reported in 2016 that about 1,000 pages of documents are locked away in the gaming commission’s files and are secret under Missouri law because Trump’s company withdrew its application on November 17, 1999. The commission lawyer says they’re sealed because the state never took action on the license application.

So ends the story of Donald Trump’s efforts to expand his casino empire to Missouri.

Had he done so, his track record indicates those projects would have been just another part of the story of the great deal-maker’s business failures.

THCR filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts and declared bankruptcy in 2009.

The Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992, closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021.

Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, California is still open but Trump left the partnership in 2006.

Trump Casino in Gary, Indiana was sold in 2005.

Trump World’s Fair in Atlantic City closed in 1999 and was demolished a year later.

Trump Castle in Atlantic City filed for Chapter bankruptcy in 1992, was sold in 2011 and is now the Golden Nugget Atlantic City.

Trump Taj Mahal on the Atlantic City boardwalk filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991,  closed in 2016 and is now the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

And those are just part of a list of failures that also include an airline, a university, a vodka and a meat business, a travel agency and a mortgage finance company. And Truth Social is weakening.

His last casino development effort was on the Caribbean Island of Canouan, described as “a place where billionaires go to escape millionaires,” when Swiss-Italian banker Antonio Saladino tried to turn his languishing resort into a successful enterprise. He hired Trump to build villas around his hotel and golf course. Trump agreed to run the golf course and put up his own casino. Saladino sold out in 2010 to an Irish billionaire who fired Trump and sold the resort in 2015.

So Missouri missed out on having Donald Trump running a casino here.  It’s probably for the best.

Missouri has thirteen casinos, none that have ever born the name “Trump.”  There are those who think we need a fourteenth one, or maybe move a license from one location to the next—-which presents another problem of what is a small town that loses its casino going to do for jobs and what’s it going to do with the boarded-up casino.  And we have another Indian Nation that is trying to open a casino .

We saw during those years the Donald Trump character that is no different today. The casino industry has moved beyond Donald Trump.  Some might think it’s because the industry is run by better people, which is a case of damning by faint praise.

Is there a lesson in this for our political system?

 

Legal?  Illegal?

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The legality of VLTs, Video Lottery Terminals, remains up in the air with a recent court ruling and because of the uncertainty of their legality and a powerful influence group at the Capitol that opposes them in their present state, we can already see the 2024 session of the General Assembly degenerating into another mud fight in the closing day that winds up killing many bills on which legislators have worked hard to put into position for final passage.

The casinos say VLTs are slot machines and casinos are the only places in Missouri that can operate slot machines.  VLT supporters say they’re some kind of different animal and, as such, are not covered by state law or regulation.

Neither side wants to talk to the other. Forget about compromise. As the clock winds down on the legislative session, both sides get more angry and more desperate and a filibuster in each of the last two years on this and some other tender issues has set lawmakers home frustrated and disappointed.

Whether VLTs are illegal is disputed not only in legislative halls, but in county prosecutors’ offices throughout the state. Only Platte County has declared them illegal and has fined a VLT operator $7,500 for promoting gambling.

The machines are not regulated by either the State Gaming Commission that regulates casinos or the State Lottery Commission that regulates lotteries. The machines generate no income for state programs and services that draw financing from gambling.

Last week, a federal judge decided seven plaintiffs who claimed they are problem gamblers (some of whom have put themselves on the state casino exclusion list) had no standing to file a lawsuit accusing Torch Electronics, a VLT operator, of violating the federal Racketeer influence and Corrupt Organizations Act with its machines. The judge held they had not shown a “tangible injury to business or property.”  He also said losing money in the machines was a voluntary act by the player—who could avoid losing money in VLTs by not playing them. He says he dismissed the part of the case dealing with the RICO act and that any further challenges belong in state court.

Torch has a lawsuit in state court. It’s scheduled to be argued next month.  It, and Warrenton Oil, want an order banning the Highway Patrol from investigating Torch’s operations. Warrenton Oil operates 54 Fast Lane convenience stores with VLTs in them.

Some people have urged Attorney General Andrew Bailey to take action against the machines. He says the issue is “too complicated” for his office to get into.

The legislature seems unwilling to be the adult in the room, telling two feuding children to shut up and telling them, “This is how it’s going to be done.” Of course, it’s hard to take that initiative. when there are thousands of dollars in campaign donations from both sides floating around.

In an election year.

Somebody has to write a rule and the legislature needs to adopt it to keep the 2024 session from turning into the sessions of 2022 and 2023.  But it is our observation that our legislature has become passive, perhaps because of term limits—that legislators don’t propose alternatives to bills like these that put lawmakers, not casinos or VLT operators in a position of authority.

After watching this show for a couple of years and growing tired of it, this helpful citizen suggested a compromise late last year.  It was given to only a couple of people but is offered here for mass consideration.

First: On the effective date of this act, all VLTs will be illegal. The Missouri Lottery Commission is authorized to establish regulations that protect the interests of the state.  Upon approval of those regulations, VLTs can operate within the parameters of this act.

Second: The Missouri Gaming Commission is authorized to  VLT districts which shall consist of the home county of any casino and all surrounding counties. Revenue derived from VTLs in that district shall be distributed to the casinos on the basis of admission numbers. The casinos  (shall be responsible for paying all taxes and fees on VLT revenue established by state law.

In districts in which there are multiple casinos whose territories would overlap, a large district will be established that incudes home counties and surrounding counties (St. Louis, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County would comprise one such district.  Kansas City and St. Joseph casinos will be in a district together (they share Platte County) and their revenues also will be determined on an admission fee basis).

Third: The Lottery Commission will be free to establish additional districts as the constitution is amended to create new casinos.

Fourth: This policy will not be applied to any tribal casino unless it is included in a compact between the tribe and the state that is approved by both chamber of the Missouri General Assembly.

The plan protects the interests of casinos while leaving much of the state (the part not served by the present river-based casinos) open to independent VLT companies.

There’s no pride of authorship here. This is a result of being tired of the annual mud fight.

Of course, this stands no chance.  He who offers it has no Political Action Committees with fat checkbooks that are essential to establishing public policy that protects the interests of the constituents of those who set that policy.

But somebody has to start a conversation if the protagonists of our ongoing drama refuse to be part of it. It might be time to an otherwise passive legislature to become active before more lawmakers see their four months of work fall into the annual mid-May mud hole.

 

NOTES FROM A QUIET, HOT, HUMID STREET

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This series of observations began a long, long, time ago as “Notes from a Battered Royal,” which were notes sent out to Missourinet affiliate stations about what we were planning and what they had done to help us.

With the coming of the computer, then the internet, and then the requirement that the Missourinet have a blog, it became “Notes From the Front Lines.”  But the author is no longer on the front lines. He lives on a quiet street.  And its getting quieter.  The folks who used to live in the house across the street now are in an assisted care place in Columbia.  One of the houses next to us hasn’t been occupied for more than a  year because the man living there also is in assisted living. Three nuns who lived in a house just across the street and up one driveway have moved out.

It’s been a while since we made some observations that don’t qualify for fully blogness.  Let us proceed.

Saw a letter to the editor in the local paper the other day that said Missouri’s state motto, Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto means “The will of the people is the Supreme Law.”  That’s wrong. And it’s dangerous.  Maybe we’ll go into in more depth later but for now, the correct interpretation is, “The welfare of the people is the Supreme Law.”  For now, just think of how different our freedoms would be if the word “will” actually was the philosophy of our government.  The quote, by the way, is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, who we know by his last name, the author of “On the Law.”

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Is there a more pitiful figure in American politics today than Rudi Giuliani?  Of all the people whose lives and reputations have been destroyed by their association with and defense of Mr. Trump, the wreckage that is Rudi is the most pitiful.

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I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona who comes north for a couple of months every summer to find cooler weather (even 10-15 degrees cooler is significant).  I call her a Sunbird.

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There are certain words that have become so politicized that all of the honor has been crushed out of them.  I recall when words such as “liberal” and “conservative” were not said with a sneer and were not spoken as if they were scarlet letters.

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The latest word that falls into this category is “evangelicals.”  The people I heard described as such while I was growing up—-and the people who had the word on their churches—were perceived as fervent believers in God and Jesus, more fervent than us Disciples, Methodists, Presbyterians and my grandmother’s Baptists.  But then came those who discovered evangelical techniques could be applied to achieving political power, making it a third word that is being abused in “the politics of personal destruction.”

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We were talking recently with some friends about the totally trivial things we remember for decades.  I remarked that I still remembered the Army service number of a high school friend who joined the service shortly after we graduated—RA18541439.

Now there’s a new number that I’d like to remember sixty years later—P01135809.  It has a certain rhythm to it, too.

And to think this person was once known only as 45.

We’ve seen the official portrait of PO-1135809.  We are sure that Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis is soooooooo intimidated.

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This is about the most enthusiastic your correspondent has been for the start of the football season in decades. Maybe it’s because this year, it will bring relief from the near-daily disappointments of baseball.

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Can’t help it.  Everytime I see a major sports team or league sign a deal with a sports-betting company, I start thinking its time to cast Cooperstown plaques for Shoeless Jackson and Pete Rose.

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The Capitol regains its heartbeat for a couple of days soon. The lawmakers will decide whether to override some of Governor Parson’s vetoes.  There’s a lot of money available to pay for the things he differs with the legislature about.

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But having a lot of money now means there’s a cushion for the bad days.

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Or we can forget about the bad days and just blow it all now.

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Or we can enact tax cuts so our tax base is even less able to deal with the eventual downturn.

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Anybody else have deer in the yard that just watch you come home and go in the house without ever getting up?  I think that in our case, they’re just resting while they digest  their latest serving of Hostas from Nancy’s garden a/k/a the deer buffet.

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A longtime friend of mine died a few days ago.  He didn’t want a memorial service.  He was a retired reporter who didn’t want his death reported in the newspaper.  Steve Forsythe, whose byline for United Press International read “A. Stevenson Forsythe” was a helluva reporter. Governor Teasdale blamed us, at least in part, for his failure to win a second term.

We could have thanked him for the compliment but we never did.

 

 

If you can’t trust the game—-

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The NFL announced last week that five players have been suspended for betting on sports contests.  Three are suspended for at least a year. Three can resume playing in game seven of the upcoming season.  Four of the players involved are with the Detroit Lions. The team has released two of them.

They aren’t the first.  Last year the NFL suspended Calvin Ridley of the Atlanta Falcons for gambling.

The Detroit Lions reportedly (ESPN) organization has fired several staff members from various departments who also might have been gambling.

A few days before that announcement, Ohio residents began wagering on sports.  The first bet was placed by former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Pete Rose, who has been banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame because of gambling.  As baseball and other sports crawl farther under the covers with gamblers, are they creeping closer to admitting people such as Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson to Halls of Fame?  Will fans believe them as much as they once did that the answer is “no.”

One of those lobbying for sports wagering in Missouri has said it will enhance fan participation in the games.

Associated Press columnist Kyle Hightower, however, wonders if our pro sports teams are undermining public confidence in themselves, writing, “The incidents have driven a public conversation about the integrity of pro sports as legalized sports betting takes a greater hold in this country.”

He quotes Professor Declan Hill at the University of New Haven who says “Leagues are dancing with the devil. Here’s what happens.  There’ll be one play that’s kind of weird and dubious and sports fans will start to do, ‘Was that legitimate?’ And then there’ll be another one. And another one and another one. And after a few years, the sports leagues will have a problem because their fundamental credibility is being debated by their fans.”

Hightower sees players becoming “ambassadors for gambling companies” by appearing in sports gambling advertisements and promotions.

Huge money is involved here—more than $220 billion since the U. S. Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018.  Leagues already are providing official stats to the big gambling companies. Some fans already wonder how pure leagues can be when this kind of big money is involved. And the money is going to be even bigger.

Missouri is an island surrounded by states with sports betting. The industry is leaning hard on the Missouri legislature to end that status. So far, internal squabbling among gambling interests has frustrated sports wagering backers.  But it seems inevitable that our lawmakers eventually will buckle.

And what will happen to our trust in the games we watch when the fans’ “participation” in the games is “enhanced?”

Humans play these games and humans make mistakes and not always by accident.  In the future fans might ask if a mistake really is a mistake? Every suspension for gambling chips away at confidence in The Game, whatever game it might be.  What happens when we wonder if that error was accidental or that missed block was really just a miss; that the pass was not intentionally thrown an inch too high or too long or too short; that the goalie really did just miss that puck or that those two free throws that bounced off the rim could have gone in?

Our pro sports teams have spent decades emphasizing the integrity of their games. We worry that the lure of big money will erode the confidence we have as we watch from the games’ grandstand.  How can we know?

How can we trust what we see?

It appears to be too late for such concerns to be prohibitive of gambling involvement in sports.

Hightower’s article concludes with a comment from Karol Corcoran, the general manager of FanDuel, one of the biggest online gambling operators, who says, “We’re in an ecosystem with customers, we’re the operators, with the leagues with our data providers. It’s important for all of us that we build together a sustainable industry. And being very careful about integrity is part of that.”

The fox is in the hen house.   And it is talking about integrity.

We wish we could say we are comforted.

—-because the fox is always hungry.

We hope we can still love and trust our games five years, ten years, from now.

 

“1776” in 2023

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We still don’t have sports wagering in Missouri.  But we do have video lottery terminals—and that really aggravates the casino folks and the pro sports teams that have seen another year of huffing and puffing on their parts gone to waste.

Watching the annual efforts of the gaming industry to bully the legislature into giving it as sweet a sweetheart deal as possible on sports wagering while VLT advocates argue that they have a right to the gambling dollar, too, has become tiresome.  Casinos see VLTs as competition.  VLT people don’t disagree but say the idea that casinos should have a monopoly on emptying the pockets of gullible Missourians is, well, unfair.

There is, of course, nothing fair about commercial gambling regardless of whether it is conducted in noisy, gaudily decorated casinos or whether it’s conducted next to the pork rinds rack or the beer cooler at the convenience store.

Neither side is interested in compromise.  And the result has been for several years the same: a deadlock at the end of a legislative session that runs the session off the rails and kills a lot of legislation that has the possibility of a greater positive impact on the lives of Missourians.  Or maybe negative impact.  But those points haven’t gotten argued.

We are reminded of John Adams’ rant early in the musical “1776,” as he rails against Congress’s inability to decide whether to declare independence from Britain:

You see, we piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Not one damn thing do we solve
Piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Nothing’s ever solved in
Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy
Philadephia!

Now, to be honest, Jefferson City is none of those things. Well, mostly. It’s not foul or fetid or fuming and filthy, although at times in the spring and the fall when the water temperature of the Missouri River is several degrees different from the air temperature, there’s plenty of fog. One almost has to get out and lead their car across the bridge, the fog is so thick.

Casino gambling is legal. Sports wagering is not.  VLTs are legal as far as their advocates are concerned but there is no law allowing them or regulating them. One county has a court ruling that says VLTs are illegal in that county.

The future?  The people who can step in and solve the problem won’t do it.  There are no grownups in the room on this one.

One person is position to provide some leadership is Attorney General Andrew Bailey.  But the Post-Dispatch reported the other day that the issue is too “complex” for him to say whether VLTs are or are not legal or to take action to find out.

He apparently is not interested in determining what machines are legal and which ones are not—or to offer suggestions to legislators who might want to put the definition in the statute books.  The article quotes Bailey saying on St. Louis radio station KTRS, “It’s impossible to make a blanket determination that everything that looks like an illegal gaming machine must therefore by definition be an illegal gambling machine.”

Others, however, say a duck is a duck.

It’s a local issue, he says, not something for the state to determine.

So, does that mean that the legislature should just butt out of the VLT discussion?

Should the state butt out of the discussion of sports wagering, too?  Should that be a local issue?

Just imagine how much fun it would be to be able to place a sports bet while standing next to a gas hose attached to your car in Callaway County but not be able to try your luck at a VLT when you go inside to get some fake bacon to snack on while you drive to Boone County, where you can spend a few minutes risking the family fortune on a VLT but not be able to bet on a sporting event when you get a beer to wash down the fake bacon.

Then you go to Cooper County to empty your pockets at the blackjack table in a legal casino.

It wouldn’t hurt if the state’s top legal officer, instead of just brushing off the issue, offered to be a mediator.  It’s not one of his constitutional duties but our attorneys general of late have set a precedent, regrettable though it might be, of straying far beyond their constitutional duties—all the way to the southern border or into the elections held in selected states.

But that’s not going to happen.  The Post-Dispatch also reported that money is fueling the Piddling and the Twiddling.

It seems that two VLT companies have taken the state to court charging it is harassing them by trying to remove their machines from convenience stores although there’s no proven law making them illegal.  Normally the Attorney General is the defense attorney for the state when it is sued. Not Bailey.  The newspaper reports he took a $25,000 campaign donation from a political action committee with ties to former House Speaker Steve Tilley, now a lobbyist for a gambling company. The story also says Bailey had taken “tens of thousands of dollars” from the two VLT companies involved in the lawsuit.

Boy oh boy.  These folks certainly know how to cultivate the public’s confidence in government, don’t they?

Will the issue of sports wagering versus video lottery terminals be resolved by the 2024 legislature?

We consulted the most reliable predictor of future events, the Magic 8 Ball.  “Don’t count on it,” the ball said.   “My sources say no,” was another response. But there were three versions of “yes” when I kept asking.

Will there be more piddling and twiddling? “Sources point to yes,” said the ball.

So—there’s your definitive answer to this matter where the issues are so clear-cut and the participants are so vitally interested in what’s in the best public interest.

 

And Down the Stretch They Come

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It’s like the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.  The big group of horses rounds the last turn, accelerating, bumping, jostling, looking for an opening, straining for the finishing line.

And then, it’s over.  Suddenly.  Done.  In the record books. The exhausted competitors head back to their barns.

The last week of this year’s regular legislative session begins today.  All of the work, the hopes, the politicking, the lobbying, the deals and compromises, the conflicts and the consensus-building comes to a merciful end at 6 p.m. Friday.

The public has no concept of what their elected representatives go through on their behalf—or at the behest of those with power to force decisions—between early January and mid-May, especially in the weeks after Easter break when the clock begins to tick more loudly and the calendar pages fall more quickly.

The greatest responsibility the legislature has each year is passage of a state budget.  This year it is $51 billion, huge, the largest budget in state history.  The state is flush with money and sometimes there’s more fighting about state spending when there’s a lot than there is when there’s a little.  With the little, lawmakers have to cover the basic services. With a lot, there are more pet projects, more promises to be fulfilled, more conflicts about what constitutes responsible fiscal policy.

Time of plenty tend to breed unnecessary discussions of policies that ultimately will make times of little even worse.  It becomes harder to defend a system that allows consistent fiscal responsibility in good times as well as bad.

This is the week when bills become Christmas Trees, as they’re called in legislative circles—bills that begin as simple measures suddenly exploding in size as lawmakers who see their bills doomed for failure find bills with better prospects on which they can hang their issues.

Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the bills finish up violating a constitutional standard that a bill can contain only one subject. Sometimes an effort to piggyback a controversial issue onto a relatively non-controversial bill kills both.

Perhaps the biggest issue involving the above scenario involves sports wagering.  Hallway talk is that gambling interests will make one last push to finally get sports wagering by tacking the bill onto a Senate-passed tax bill during House debate and sending it back to the Senate for approval with no time for negotiations. The Senate must take sports wagering, which would face certain death on its own, if it wants to finally approve a more general bill that it has already passed.

If you have trouble following that description, you are not alone.  Bills can become sacrificial lambs as well as becoming Christmas trees.  Believe it or not, the process as a certain fascination the more you watch it.  We will not try to influence your judgment about how moral or ethical that process is.

Sports wagering has at least one strong opponent in the Senate who is prepared to filibuster if the issue returns in some form from the House—and filibustering means there won’t be time for several other bills to be considered as the clock winds down.

So will the sports wagering advocates, desperate to get the issue approved after five years of previous failures, cause the death of other issues because they cannot take “no” for an answer? Again?

This is a nervous time for majority leadership in both chambers because they know every deck contains 52 wild cards at this time of year.   To their credit, they’ve run the place pretty well in 2023, particularly compared the debacle of 2022. But they know their leadership legacy might rest on what happens by 6 p.m. Friday.

Everybody is excited to be coming to Jefferson City each January.  But speed limits will become  just roadside advisories for a lot of people after the gavel falls Friday evening.