New Mexico has a rocky gambling background. When the IGRA was signed by the House in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it seemed like New Mexico would be one of the states to get on the Indian casino bandwagon. Politics assured that wouldn’t be the situation.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King announced a working group in 1990 to create a contract with New Mexico Amerindian tribes. When the working group came to an accord with 2 prominent local bands a year later, the Governor declined 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 gaming in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when the new Governor passed the compact with the American Indian tribes, anti-gaming groups were able to tie the contract up in the courts. A New Mexico court found that the Governor 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 compact amongst the Government of New Mexico and its Indian tribes. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, including Native casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo industry has grown from Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico charity game owners acquired just $3,048. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and passed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Not for profit Bingo revenues have increased steadily since that time. 2005 saw the greatest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the providers.
Bingo is certainly favored in New Mexico. All sorts of owners try for a slice of the action. Hopefully, the politicos are done batting over gaming as a hot button issue like they did in the 1990’s. That’s without doubt wishful thinking.
This entry was posted on May 27, 2022, 2:25 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.