Sports Betting Remains a Mess
Instead of being an industry leader in showing states how to implement competent legal regimes for gambling and marijuana, Maryland has instead served as an example of how not to do it.
Lost in the sauce of the Labor Day Holiday Weekend was the fact that the Maryland Sports Wagering Application Review Commission is still pushing forward the diversity argument:
The Maryland Sports Wagering Application Review Commission unanimously approved a policy amendment Friday that requires companies awarded a mobile betting license in Maryland to then submit a diversity plan.
The plan, submitted to the commission known as SWARC within 30 days after licensure approval, should include strategies to obtain a diverse group of owners or contractors, conduct diversity-related events and proposed timelines and benchmarks to achieve diversity objectives.
An applicant must also check “yes” to three boxes that summarizes it will make a “good faith effort” to meet the diversity objectives, report diversity metrics to the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Commission and make its diversity plan available to the public.
“SWARC will consider any type of diverse group where an Applicant can demonstrate that an individual has been disadvantaged and, therefore, inclusion of the individual as a participant in the Diversity Plan would be beneficial,” according to the addendum.
If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the same type of “Diversity Plan” and minority set-aside arguments that made legal marijuana in Maryland such a disaster.
But the SWARC also, unintentionally, made a note of the fact that this entire enterprise has nothing to do with “meeting diversity objectives” and more to do with political posturing to make it seem like the SWARC is doing what the can in “meeting diversity objectives”:
A commission member asked what would happen if a diversity plan is deficient.
“There’s no opportunity of cancelation of the license. The license has been awarded,” said Assistant Attorney General David Stamper.
So the SWARC, instead of focusing on getting licenses awarded as accurately and correctly as possible, is focused on making sure that potential license holders tell the commission that they are meeting diversity goals that they may or may not have any intention of following through on.
You would think that the Maryland General Assembly would be annoyed by these delays, but if you listen to Senate President Bill Ferguson it was the entire point of passing mobile gaming legislation in the first place:
“When the MGA passed sports wagering, it did so with the goal of promoting diversity in the industry,” Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) and House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) said in a statement Friday. “The regulations approved, today, by AELR that require sports wagering licensee applicants to seek out minority investors, to use the State’s nationally recognized minority business enterprise program in contracting and submit a substantive diversity plan will help achieve that goal. We are confident that these measures will ensure meaningful minority participation in this new industry.”
What are we doing here? The General Assembly is focusing on diversity goals instead of actually getting mobile gaming implemented as quickly as possible. So what was the point of authorizing mobile gaming: was it increasing revenues or was it minority set-asides?
That’s an important question when you consider that football season is underway. Football season is one of the two biggest betting periods in sports gaming, along with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. So far, SWARC has fiddled around and two weeks of college football mobile betting have been missed. On top of it, the NFL season kicks off in two days. How much money is SWARC leaving on the table by not having mobile betting regulations already implemented to mobile betting vendors can have their operations launched?
When do they think they might have everything good to go? By the end of the year, missing all of football season.
Maryland has gambled (no pun intended) on two vices in order to increase revenues: marijuana and gambling. Instead of being an industry leader in showing states how to implement competent legal regimes for these two industries, Maryland has instead served as an example of how not to do it.