12.27
Bingo in New Mexico
New Mexico has a stormy gambling past. When the IGRA was passed by the House in 1989, it looked like New Mexico might be one of the states to get on the Indian casino craze. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a working group in Nineteen Ninety to draft a compact with New Mexico Indian tribes. When the working group arrived at an agreement with two prominent local tribes a year later, Governor King declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until 1994.
When a new governor took over in 1995, it appeared that Native gambling in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor signed the contract with the Native bands, anti-gambling groups were able to hold the deal up in courts. A New Mexico court ruled that the Governor had out stepped his bounds in signing the deal, therefore denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It took the Compact Negotiation Act, passed by the New Mexico government, to get the process moving on a full contract between the Government of New Mexico and its Indian bands. A decade had been lost for gambling in New Mexico, including Native casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo business has grown from 1999. In that year, New Mexico charity game providers acquired only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have increased constantly since that time. 2005 witnessed the largest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the providers.
Bingo is clearly popular in New Mexico. All types of operators try for a slice of the pie. With hope, the politicians are done batting around gambling as an important issue like they did in the 1990’s. That’s without doubt wishful thinking.
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