New Mexico has a stormy gambling background. When the IGRA was passed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to cash in on the Indian casino bandwagon. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a working group in 1990 to draft an accord with New Mexico Amerindian tribes. When the panel arrived at an accord with two important local bands a year later, Governor King refused to sign the bargain. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took over in 1995, it seemed that Native gambling in New Mexico was a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson passed the accord with the Amerindian bands, anti-gaming groups were able to hold the contract up in courts. A New Mexico court found that the Governor had overstepped his bounds in signing the deal, thereby denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It required the Compact Negotiation Act, signed by the New Mexico house, to get the ball rolling on a full contract between the Government of New Mexico and its Amerindian tribes. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, including Amerindian casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo industry has grown since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico non-profit game operators acquired only $3,048. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and passed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo earnings have increased steadily since then. Two Thousand and Five saw the biggest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.
Bingo is apparently beloved in New Mexico. All sorts of operators try for a piece of the pie. With hope, the politicos are done batting around gambling as a key factor like they did in the 1990’s. That’s probably hopeful thinking.
This entry was posted on April 8, 2022, 5:25 pm and is filed under Bingo. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.