00:00All right, let's start off with the casino gaming, a hot topic for the year.
00:04Some states saying yes, some states saying no.
00:07Maryland is in like a limbo state, I guess, fair to say.
00:11No, we're going to Maine, Craig.
00:13I think you screwed that up.
00:15My bad.
00:16Not to call you out.
00:17Maine, my bad.
00:18But yeah, so the year's been crazy.
00:21I mean, this is something that we thought was going to be a wave similar to the sports betting wave we saw of legalization.
00:29You know, once one state legalized, a bunch of other states legalized, and now we're, you know, nearly a full U.S. map of sports betting states.
00:38Well, online casino has not done anything remotely like that.
00:41We had a few states that went online with online casino right away.
00:45New Jersey, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan.
00:48And elsewhere, it's just been slow.
00:50There's been a lot of hesitancy to say, okay, let's go ahead and put slots in people's pockets so they can play it on the couch or on the bus or wherever they want to play.
01:00You get a lot of, you're getting a lot of pushback now, too, from casinos, in-person brick-and-mortar casinos saying, hey, that's going to take, you know, jobs away from people.
01:09It's going to take revenue from our physical locations.
01:11It's not good.
01:12So, anyway, on top of a ton of headwinds that we've seen pick up because of the sports betting boom and kind of negative fallout from that.
01:21So, you've got a lot of headwinds.
01:23Not a lot of states have been seeing a lot of action for online casino legislation.
01:26In Maine, we had a bill introduced last year.
01:30It didn't gain very much traction.
01:33Reintroduced again this year.
01:35Was tabled early in the session.
01:37Figured that was dead, just like we saw in a couple other states this year.
01:41And then all of a sudden, early in June, it kind of blossomed and took off.
01:45Made it to the appropriations table, which we talked about on the show.
01:50And in Maine, every bill that touches the revenue of the state and has a fiscal note has to be looked at by the appropriations table.
01:59Not many bills end up making it off of that table.
02:02I think it's something like 20% or so.
02:04300 made it to the table this year.
02:07And they sent more than normal, including the online casino bill, on to the governor.
02:14I think it was 116.
02:16That's 40%, I think, if I'm doing my math correctly.
02:18So we figured, all right, well, Janet Mills, she's not exactly pro-gambling.
02:23She did go ahead and sign the online sports betting situation in Maine a couple years ago.
02:29That's live, of course.
02:31However, her administration and the Maine Gaming Control Unit and the Maine Gaming Control Board all testified against the online casino bill.
02:40And so we figured, okay, there's a chance she signs it in law just because the legislature said yes.
02:45But she also might not.
02:46It comes out last week that she did indeed go ahead and not sign it.
02:51She's going to wait until the legislature comes back into session next year and maybe veto it.
02:58Maybe give them a chance to overturn it if they want.
03:00But I don't think the votes are there.
03:02So it is a really interesting situation when it comes to online casino in Maine because you've got the legislature saying, hey, let's do it.
03:08And you've got the governor saying, I don't know, I don't think we should do it and testifying it against it during the process.
03:15Of note, it would likely be a similar situation to online sports betting where you have three of the four tribes partnered with Caesars and another tribe partnered with DraftKings.
03:25And so it is a very small market population-wise and also a very small market in terms of operators.
03:30But again, online casino expansion in the U.S. is extremely slow, a lot slower than I think we all would have thought five years ago as sports betting took off.
03:40But you're going to start to see, I think, next year a few more states kind of trickle into this on top of Maine.
03:47And you had Illinois kind of talk about it.
03:49Governor J.B. Pritzker pitched it as an idea to help cut down the budget deficit.
03:53Of course, we've got a weird tax fallout there.
03:56Maryland had some discussion.
03:57Again, a couple other states are near it, I think.
04:00But Maine is the closest one.
04:02But we'll see.
04:03We'll have to wait and see what Governor Mills does probably next year still.
