Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives has once again approved online gambling and daily fantasy sports legislation but the odds appear stacked against the Senate following suit.
Pennsylvania’s House convened a special session on Thursday in an attempt to finish some unfinished business that didn’t get covered on Wednesday, which was supposed to be their last official day of work before the November election.
Among the items on their to-do list was the quick-fix bill the Senate passed on Tuesday to temporarily fill the funding gap created in September when the state Supreme Court struck down a local share slots tax law as unconstitutional.
The House approved their HB 1887 bill by a respectable margin (110-71) on Thursday, but not before amending it to include a permanent fix to the local share tax issue, as well as the online gambling, DFS and airport mobile gaming language in the HB 2150 bill the House approved in June.
The gauntlet has thus been thrown at the Senate’s feet, challenging senators to approve the measure when they reconvene for a single day one week after the November 8 election. The House appears to be betting that the Senate won’t balk if it means depriving the host communities of their missing slots tax revenue.
State Sen. Pat Browne told the Morning Call that he’d been hoping the House would pass the host fee fix bill without any amendments. Browne said the Senate would “definitely come back in a few weeks and take a look at [the amended bill], but we still haven’t decided whether to vote on it.”
Senate Republican general counsel Drew Compton also sounded a pessimistic note, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the Senate “did what we did on gaming and I think that’s all we plan on doing for the rest of the year.”
Legislators had vowed to pry an extra $100m out of gaming for the 2016-17 budget, but the mechanism for arriving at that figure was never specified. Should the Senate decline to pass the House bill as is, it and every other unapproved bills will die and will have to be reintroduced from scratch when the new legislative session commences in January.
BRANDED SKINS A DEAL-BREAKER?
While many of the state’s 12 casino operators have expressed support for online gambling, others – most notably Sheldon Adelson’s Sands Bethlehem – remain vehemently opposed. And yet another wrinkle was introduced last week when a local casino operator suggested casinos should only be allowed to operate online under their own brands.
In an interview with GamblingCompliance, Penn National Gaming’s senior VP of government relations Eric Schippers suggested that legislators “should not allow out-of-state online operators to offer branded skins through partnerships with local casinos.” Schippers said online-only brands “have no incentive to drive business back to brick-and-mortar casinos.”
Needless to say, Canada’s Amaya Gaming wasn’t thrilled with the notion that its PokerStars brand – which operates just across the border in New Jersey’s regulated online market – might be shut out of Pennsylvania. Amaya spokesman Eric Hollreiser said the New Jersey experiment had demonstrated that Atlantic City casinos were benefiting from their online partner brands.
The House’s online gambling legislation would allow casinos to offer multiple branded online skins while the most recent online legislative effort in the Senate (SB 900) restricted online licensees to a single brand. Add this obstacle to the already obstructed course legislators need to cross before Pennsylvania joins New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware in the US regulated market club.
