Maryland Pushes for Online Casino Legislation Progress

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00:00potential online casino progress here. In fact, one of the state legislature, from what I'm reading

00:05here, said this could happen without the sky falling. So it must seem like there's some

00:09opposition coming in a big way for this to happen. Yeah, so first of all, right now we're heating up

00:16in legislative season. A lot of them are taking off on Wednesday to start, so we're going to be

00:22talking a lot about legislation here in the coming weeks, Craig. Just kind of sports betting in states

00:27that we haven't seen legalized yet, online casino in a lot of states, sports betting taxes, what have

00:33you. First thing to note on online casino is there's only a few markets in the country that

00:38have it, including Michigan where I am, and it's been a lot slower to pick up legalization-wise

00:43than the industry might have hoped, and I don't think that's really going to change, especially

00:47with the new headwinds against online gambling. You know, we've talked about it here at the U.S.

00:52Senate hearing, the U.S. federal bills targeting online gambling, the likes, and just general,

00:59you know, public feeling right now is kind of anti-gambling, and so that's going to affect a lot

01:04of these state-level discussions. But in Maryland, we've got a former representative who introduced

01:10a bill last year for online casino and actually got it through the Maryland House delegate Vanessa

01:16Atterbury. She's introducing another bill. It will begin in her Ways and Means Committee that

01:22she chairs and held a very lengthy hearing last year to discuss it, and yeah, she said, you know,

01:28we can do this. We need to do this. There's illegal gambling happening, but yeah, to your point, she

01:34said we can do it without the sky falling. It's important that we do this. She talks about how

01:38she's not a gambler, but she'll go to casinos for events and stuff to kind of quell the

01:43cannibalization discussions that we also heard in Maryland last year. Now, the problem here is the

01:49Senate in Maryland. Senator Ron Watson introduced a pretty similar bill to Atterbury last year,

01:56but the Senate is less friendly to gaming it appears for right now. It did not even take up

02:01Atterbury's bill, and Watson, you know, went to the National Council of Legislators from Gaming

02:07States last year, talked about kind of lessons learned. He said there's a lot of campaigning

02:12that needs to be done internally in the Senate kind of to educate what this means and why it's

02:17important. We'll see if anything changes on the Senate floor this year. We'll see if the House can

02:24kind of redo last year. It was a pretty overwhelming vote for in the House, so we'll see if that

02:30wave kind of continues over, but again, a lot of headwinds against online gambling, so I'd

02:35be kind of surprised if this does pass, but Maryland is certainly one of the states to

02:39watch in terms of states that could get it done this year.