All-powerful Everglade State tribal gaming manipulator the Seminoles are plowing millions of dollars into a unexampled political committee called “Standing Up for Florida,” Florida Politics reports.
The tribe is hoping to sabotage efforts by out-of-state gaming companies that want to take exception its gaming monopolies via voter-led petitions.
“Standing Up for Florida” has kicked away its drive with a TV and digital media ad titled “Watch Out, Florida.” The ad’s tagline is a quarter warning to voters: “Don’t Sign Petitions.”
Out-of-state gambling companies are disbursement tens of millions to release our tell into another Las Vegas. They want to convert our organization to allow out-of-control gambling with no guarantees for us and prominent profits for them,” the TV spot claims.
The Seminoles sustain a virtual monopoly on cassino gaming inwards FL (bar a handful of slots licensees inwards Broward and Miami-Dade counties) at their 7 Hard Rock-branded casinos, and they need it to delay that way. They also at present make a monopoly on sports betting, thanks to a young pack understanding negotiated with Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Voters inward Charge?
While the tribe does not epithet these grave out-of-staters, its targets are clear. LVS Corp and its powerful lobbyists hold been sniffing around Florida for years in the go for that someone power let them build a cassino resort.
Now the Las Vegas-based keep company has teamed upwards with Alabama’s Poarch Band of Creek Indians on a ballot initiative called “Florida Voters inward Charge.”
The initiative asks voters to exchange the say formation to allow pari-mutuel scorecard rooms in Second Earl of Guilford Everglade State to turn fully fledged casinos, provided they are 130 miles out from the Seminole reservation.
Theoretically, this could take into account LVS or the Poarch Creek to purchase a identity card room that could and then follow transformed into a casino resort in or around the Jacksonville area.
Meanwhile, DraftKings and FanDuel need voters to rearwards a to a greater extent inclusive nomadic sports betting market, specifically I that includes them.
This is via their committee, “Florida Education Champions,” which promises that disrupting the Seminole monopoly will bring to a greater extent revenue to schools.
As the Seminoles line in their campaign, they make up $500 gazillion to the tell each year. And they would feature a grammatical case to renegotiate in this enter downwards if “Florida Education Champions'” vision of all time became a reality.
The two initiatives want 891,589 signatures from registered tell voters to be placed on the ballot inwards 2022.
Could Amendment 3 Backfire?
Ironically, the federation of tribes championed a ballot initiative of their own backward inward 2018. At elections that year, Florida residents passed Amendment 3, which established that all casino gaming expansion must follow approved past voters in a public ballot.
The take the field was bankrolled by the Seminoles with the aid of Disney. And despite the tribe’s current advice non to mark petitions in general, it got the necessary signatures, and at long last the votes, to suit law.
The folk believed this would assist safeguard their monopoly, because it would forestall the general assembly from approbatory laws that benefited commercial message gaming interests.
But it also gave a bundle of “interfering out-of-staters” an out of doors chance of gaining the sort of ground inward Florida that the law-makers has resisted for years.