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Florida Gambling Compact Back to Drawing Board
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA --
After months of tough legislative battles, followed by weeks of negotiation between Governor Charlie Crist and the Seminole Tribe, the deal to settle Florida's gambling laws is about to be thrown back to the starting point. Influential state Representative Bill Galvano told the Sun-Sentinel that there would be no special legislative session to approve Crist's agreement, and that a new gambling bill would probably come out of next year's session.
Although Crist's package follows generally the guidelines established in the legislature, mounting complaints by track casinos and poker rooms have led a backswell to second-guess the proposed compact.
The Seminole deal would earn Florida a minimum of $150 million a year; in return, the state would have to guarantee the tribe exclusive table gaming privileges, plus an assurance that slots would not expand out of Broward and Dade counties to the rest of the state.
“The members have raised issues beyond just the compact and the pari-mutuel side, and looked at issues as large as how do we deal with gambling in Florida as a whole," Galvano told the Ft. Lauderdale paper. "We are a gaming state. And we have allowed ourselves, by piecemeal authorization, to get into a situation where our gaming is not the benefit it could be to the state of Florida yet it has the negative impacts."
Galvano proposes to deal with racinos separate from tribal casinos, thinking that such an approach may actually bring the state more than the proposed Seminole payment. But this strategy may risk forfeiting any revenue whatsoever from the tribal casinos, which only need to pay if they are extended privileges otherwise unavailable anywhere in the state.
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