• Home

Read more about the
Las Vegas 2024 Super
Bowl Streaker!

New Mexico has a stormy gambling background. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it seemed like New Mexico might be one of the states to get on the American Indian casino bandwagon. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the situation.

The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a panel in Nineteen Ninety to draft a compact with New Mexico Native bands. When the working group arrived at an accord with 2 big local bands a year later, the Governor declined to sign the agreement. He would hold up a deal until 1994.

When a new governor took office in 1995, it seemed that Native gaming in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson passed the accord with the Amerindian bands, anti-wagering groups were able to tie the deal up in the courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the compact, thus costing the government of New Mexico hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees over the next several years.

It required the Compact Negotiation Act, passed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full compact amongst the Government of New Mexico and its Amerindian bands. Ten years had been burned for gaming in New Mexico, which includes Amerindian casino Bingo.

The non-profit Bingo business has gotten bigger since 1999. In that year, New Mexico non-profit game operators acquired only $3,048. That climbed to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have grown constantly since that time. Two Thousand and Five witnessed the greatest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.

Bingo is certainly beloved in New Mexico. All sorts of owners try for a piece of the action. Hopefully, the politicos are done batting around gaming as an important factor like they did back in the 90’s. That is most likely hopeful thinking.

Log in