New Mexico has a rocky gambling past. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to cash in on the Native casino craze. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King announced a panel in Nineteen Ninety to discuss a compact with New Mexico Indian tribes. When the panel arrived at an accord with 2 big local bands a year later, the Governor refused to sign the bargain. He would hold up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took office in 1995, it seemed that Amerindian gaming in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when the new Governor passed the compact with the Indian tribes, anti-gaming groups were able to tie the accord up in the courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had out stepped his bounds in signing the deal, thereby costing the state of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It took the CNA, signed by the New Mexico house, to get the ball rolling on a full contract between the Government of New Mexico and its American Indian tribes. A decade had been lost for gambling in New Mexico, which includes Amerindian casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo business has increased since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico not for profit game providers brought in only $3,048. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed one million dollars in revenues in 2001. Not for profit Bingo revenues have grown constantly 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 look for a slice of the pie. Hopefully, the politicos are done batting over gaming as a hot button factor like they did back in the 1990’s. That’s probably hopeful thinking.
This entry was posted on September 23, 2019, 9:25 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.