Mississippi Pushes for Launching of Online Sports Betting
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SportsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Another good sign for Mississippi,
00:06 Mississippi trying to get that online going.
00:07 They send a sports betting bill over to the Senate.
00:11 Have you had a full chance to digest what this says, Pat,
00:14 and kind of where things stand there?
00:15 - I mean, it's a pretty similar situation, honestly.
00:19 You know, the House Rep Casey Eure was one of the leaders
00:24 of the online mobile sports betting task force in the fall,
00:28 which was created by his legalization bill last year.
00:31 And he's straight upset.
00:33 You know, I used the information from that task force
00:36 to inform my bill.
00:37 I don't, you know, at the time he said,
00:39 I don't know that it'll pass the House
00:41 and I can't guarantee anything in the Senate.
00:43 But I mean, he introduced it on Monday.
00:46 He got it through his own gaming committee on Tuesday.
00:50 And by Thursday, it's through the House.
00:52 So it's a very rapid pace in Mississippi.
00:55 And it's kind of the same situation where you're like,
00:57 okay, maybe this is just getting it over to the Senate,
01:00 letting them iron out whatever details
01:03 and see where it goes from there.
01:05 There were some interesting kind of wrinkles yesterday.
01:09 You know, on Wednesday, it was supposed to get a floor vote,
01:12 but then I heard from a source
01:13 that there was some tax issues coming up among the reps.
01:15 And sure enough, yesterday, Eure amended the bill
01:19 to rather than an 8% state tax
01:22 and a 4% local municipality tax,
01:25 to just do 12% to a state emergency road and bridge fund.
01:28 So that was kind of solved there.
01:31 But yeah, kind of the same issue
01:35 as we have in the House in Georgia,
01:36 we have in the Senate in Mississippi,
01:38 where it's just kind of like, do the chambers agree?
01:42 Do the parties within the chambers agree?
01:44 As we've talked about before, heading into this year,
01:46 we had a lot of kind of differing opinions
01:50 on what the presidential national election will have
01:55 on sports betting state by state.
01:58 Again, you've got people on both sides of the aisle
02:01 in Mississippi who like sports betting
02:03 and people on both sides of the aisle
02:04 who don't like sports betting.
02:06 So you do need that bipartisan support.
02:08 And in a election cycle, in a presidential election year,
02:13 anything can kind of happen where parties
02:17 just kind of batten down the hatches
02:19 and don't wanna work together.
02:20 So that's certainly something,
02:21 the further we get into the session
02:24 might happen in Mississippi or Georgia.
02:26 So again, kind of up in the air.
02:29 It's just a surprising state
02:32 'cause they've had it since 2018 in casinos
02:37 and geo-fenced online apps within those casino properties.
02:40 So this really is a very kind of simple step,
02:43 you would think, but you're getting a lot of pushback
02:46 from local casinos, local casino independent operators
02:49 who are saying, "We don't want the big casino operators,
02:52 "be it Caesars, MGM, whoever,
02:53 "to come in and just dominate the market."
02:56 There were a couple of discussions yesterday
02:59 where they thought, "Well, if we have 26 operators,
03:01 "can't they all just partner and pay all the casinos?"
03:04 And there were some interesting suggestions
03:07 and to that point, 'cause they don't want one major casino
03:10 getting fan duel and making the little casinos
03:13 kind of pay for not having a big partner.
03:15 So there's gonna be a lot of vocal opposition
03:19 from them and a lot of lawmakers
03:22 certainly won't wanna upset them.
03:23 So again, a huge step forward,
03:26 lots of time to figure out these issues,
03:29 but they haven't gotten it done this far,
03:31 so who knows if they get it done this year.
03:34 (upbeat music)
03:37 (upbeat music)