Rhode Island Starts Open Bidding Process To Solicit Vendors To Run Sports Betting Operations
Things are starting to heat up in Rhode Island regarding the future of sports betting, and the state’s lawmakers are making aggressive moves to get prepared.
The big news, of course, is that legislators in the Plantation State have approved opening the bidding process to accept applications from interested vendors for the purpose of running Rhode Island’s exclusive sports betting operation at the Twin River Casino. While other states were busy passing laws to legalize and regulate sports betting in anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), Rhode Island took things to the next level with a move that bold. It makes sense though, as the Ocean State, the smallest in terms of land area in the entire country, is convinced that it has to move fast or it will get left behind by nearby states like Connecticut, which, while not huge in square mileage, have a much more fully developed gambling industry.
Though time is of the essence for every state involved in the sports betting legalization process right now, with a decision on PASPA looking like it could come literally any day between now in early April and the end of the SCOTUS 2018 term in June, the stakes for the Ocean State are even higher. Rhode Island doesn’t make big leaps like it is doing – and lawmakers have even gone as far as to include a $23.5 million stake in its proposed Fiscal Year 2018-2019 budget - the state could lose out on a lot more than a slice of a newly legal sports betting market in the US. The Plantation State could lose its entire gaming industry – the third biggest source of revenues in the state -due to nothing more than simply not being competitive with other states that are already further along in the process to set up a regulating sports wagering marketplace.
With that being said, it looks like a showdown could be brewing between Rhode Island and Connecticut, or at least a heated footrace as the two neighboring New England states try to get their proverbial foot in the sports betting door before the other state does. Even though the prize – a leg up over the competition and a more secure future for the state’s various gambling industries – is the same for both states in this rapidly developing contest, the way each of the rivals is going about coming first in the race reveals a lot about their respective priorities. By way of contrast with Rhode Island, which just wants somebody – anybody – to come in and run their casino sportsbook operation so long as whoever ends up with the job after the RFP process can get sports betting up and running by Oct. 1, Connecticut has its tribal casino operators to consider.
In fact, the tribes – those being the Mashantuckets Pequot Tribe, which owns and runs the Foxwoods Resort Casino, and the Hohegan Tribe, which (as should be patently obvious) owns and runs the Hohegan Sun casino – are the exclusive rights holders to gaming agreements with the state of Connecticut. Though the Connecticut legislature has taken some big steps to regulate sports betting in recent days, passing Senate Bill 540 (SB540) though the Public Safety and Security Committee and on to the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, the latter body has a deadline of Thursday, April 12 to make a decision. The overwhelmingly positive relationship Connecticut’s statehouse has with the state’s tribal casino operators (and the favorable response in terms of tourism and gambling dollars to the state’s premier casino operations) should help grease the gears of the legislative process in this regard.
Foxwoods Casino Resort Executive Director of Online Gaming Seth Young testified to the members of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee that the expansion of Connecticut’s gambling industry to include sports betting would be – surprise, surprise – a huge boon for the state, the casinos and the tribes alike. Young went as far as to say that the state of Connecticut could reasonably expect to collect upward of $40 million in new revenue for the public coffers over a five year period if it was allowed to regulate and tax sports betting inside its borders. Since the Mashantuckets Pequot and the Mohegans, both of which would retain their exclusive rights to offer all the same gambling options they have enjoyed plus sports betting if allowed by the Supreme Court’s much anticipated striking down of PASPA, they ought to know what they are talking about.
Another pretty major check in the “positives” column for SB540, and hopefully a leading edge indicator of its eventual success by late next week is that it also explicitly authorize the tribal casino operators to offer online sports betting options and digital lottery pull tabs at the Connecticut lotto’s website. Young, when testifying before the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, in effect said that with that one move the estimated amount of state tax revenues Connecticut could expect to get from its gambling industry would shoot up to $127.7 million in the same five year time frame.
Back next door in Rhode Island, lawmakers there have not talked much about the specifics of their plans for expanding sports betting into the digital realm, with the details of the RFP only saying that whichever vendor is chosen would be able to set up sports betting at brick and mortar casinos. The RFP also does not include any details about the amount of gaming revenues the state would look to tax in terms of a percentage of gross adjusted sports wagering revenues either, other than the $23.5 million anticipated by the Fiscal Year 2018-2019 budget proposal set forth by Gov. Gina Raimondo. That being said, the RFP does include language requesting that applicants provide more information about any “innovative wagering options” in their proposals, which we tend to think refers to online sports betting options.
Lending further credence to the widely held and fervently endorsed opinion that online and mobile sports betting platforms should at least be included in any expansion of legal gambling in Rhode Island and, truthfully, elsewhere in the country, is the fact that DraftKings testified to that effect in the Plantation State earlier this week. DraftKings, has been making some lateral moves of its own to work a way into the out and out sports betting sector if the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of New Jersey and kills PASPA or if the U.S. Congress simply repeals it. If either of those events (we might even be tempted to call them eventualities in today’s climate) comes to pass, DraftKings - which boasts of having a user base of 10 million registered account holders - could get out from underneath federal and state level scrutiny for toeing the line on being a de facto sports betting purveyor.
Just pure speculation here at SportsBettingRhodeIsland.com, but a theoretical partnership or at least a cross pollination between the Rhode Island gambling regulatory authorities, the Twin Rivers casino operators and an established and well respected company like DraftKings probably would not be the hardest sell to the people of the Ocean State. If nothing else, it makes a good deal of sense in terms of helping Rhode Island stay competitive with other states in New England that are already way ahead in terms of setting up a sports betting infrastructure. The times are a-changing fast, and Rhode Island will have to move quick if it doesn’t want to get left behind and left out in the cold once PASPA is dead and buried.
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