Connecticut’s governor is pouring a big bucket of ice-cold water on proposed legislation that would simultaneously legalize sports betting, online gambling and a new casino in Bridgeport.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan coalition of Connecticut legislators announced they’d crafted ‘An Act Concerning Jobs in and Revenue from the Gaming Industry.’ State Senator Cathy Osten (pictured), who authored the bill, says she hopes to convene a special session of the legislature but otherwise plans to introduce the bill when the next scheduled session gets underway on January 9, 2020.
Osten’s bill is heavily tilted towards the state’s two gaming tribes, the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan, who respectively run the Foxwoods Resort and Mohegan Sun casinos and are collaborating on a joint venture satellite casino project in East Windsor dubbed Tribal Winds.
The proposed legislation would allow the tribes to open sportsbooks at their land-based casinos, as well as grant them the exclusive right to offer online sports betting, casino, poker and eSports products, while the Connecticut Lottery would be allowed to offer online ticket sales and keno.
The tribes would also be granted the right to build a new jointly run casino in Bridgeport — in addition to Tribal Winds — as well as several smaller retail sports betting operations in Hartford and two other unspecified locales. That would most certainly be opposed by MGM Resorts, which has lobbied for its own right to run a Bridgeport casino while doing everything it can to stymie the tribes’ East Windsor plans.
To no one’s surprise, the tribes expressed support for Osten’s bill, saying it “takes us one step closer” to the goal of preserving “the historic partnership” between the tribes and the state.
But Gov. Ned Lamont was already on record as saying legislators needed to cool their heels on any Bridgeport proposals, and his office was equally unenthusiastic regarding Osten’s new bill, which it claimed to have received “only last week.”
Lamont issued a statement saying that “a matter of such significance requires substantial involvement from multiple stakeholders, in particular the executive branch. Something this complex should not be negotiated without all necessary parties and certainly not behind closed doors.”
There’s also the small matter of Sportech, the UK-listed firm that runs the state’s off-track betting facilities and has been itching to add legal sports betting to its offering, something Lamont supports. Osten’s bill makes no mention of Sportech, whose CEO Richard McGuire told the Hartford Courant that the company could launch its own legal action if it was left on the outside looking in.
Alluding to the likelihood of legal tie-ups, Lamont said his administration’s position continued to be that the only way forward was “a global resolution that mitigates the likelihood of years of litigation and positions the state to capitalize on a comprehensive gaming platform.”
The Connecticut Mirror quoted Osten essentially saying that this was as good as it’s going to get, noting that legislators had been trying to square this circle for two years, and “if there was a deal to be made, it would have been made.”
