New Mexico Bingo
New Mexico has a rocky gambling past. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was signed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it seemed like New Mexico would be one of the states to cash in on the Native casino bandwagon. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a working group in Nineteen Ninety to negotiate an accord with New Mexico Native bands. When the task force came to an accord with 2 big local tribes a year later, the Governor refused to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until 1994.
When a new governor took over in 1995, it appeared that Amerindian wagering in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson signed the accord with the Amerindian bands, anti-wagering groups were able to hold the deal up in courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing a deal, therefore denying the state of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees over the next several years.
It required the Compact Negotiation Act, signed by the New Mexico house, to get the ball rolling on a full contract between the State of New Mexico and its Amerindian bands. A decade had been burned for gaming in New Mexico, which includes Indian casino Bingo.
The non-profit Bingo business has gotten bigger from 1999. In that year, New Mexico charity game owners brought in only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and exceeded a million dollars in 2001. Not for profit Bingo earnings have grown constantly since that time. 2005 witnessed the greatest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the providers.
Bingo is apparently popular in New Mexico. All sorts of owners try for a piece of the pie. Hopefully, the politicos are done batting around gaming as an important matter like they did back in the 1990’s. That’s probably wishful thinking.
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