Gaming industry experts in Ohio are urging the legislature to act quickly to legalize sports betting so that the Buckeye state doesn’t lag behind other regional states in taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s lifting of the ban on the activity.
Pennsylvania, West Virginia are moving quickly to catch up with Delaware and New Jersey, which have already put an infrastructure in place and are accepting bets.
“If Ohio lags behind, and Pennsylvania and West Virginia have already legalized … it will be really hard to get people back to Ohio,” said Jay Masurekar, of KeyBanc Capital Markets in Cleveland.
However, said Masurekar, the state is weighty with the number of sports teams based there, and so has a large core of sports fans willing to place bets. “So I think there is definitely strong pent-up demand,” he told the Columbus Dispatch.
Experts project that the state could collect up to 7 percent of betting revenue once the regulatory structure is in place. That could mean tens of millions of dollars for the state government. It would also drive new business to the state’s four existing casinos and seven racinos, which are expected to be hubs for sports betting.
The companies that operate those casinos have been relatively quiet on the issue. The legislature has “placeholder” bills in play that has started the conversation going among lawmakers without nailing down any details. It lacks details on such things as tax rates and where betting would be allowed.
Penn National Gaming, owner of the Hollywood Casino, when asked for a comment, issued a statement to the Dispatch: “We’re glad to see the legislature beginning the process of developing sports-wagering legislation, and we look forward to sharing our views as the legislative process continues.”
Eldorado Scioto Downs declined to comment.
David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said two competing forces are at work within the state government: “It’s inefficiency and slowness versus the desire for money.”
Once a state law is passed, it will still take time to add regulations on top and then launch operations. This has already been demonstrated in several states. In Mississippi, although sports betting became legal the first part of July, casinos were not yet ready to take bets.
Predicting gaming revenues is tricky, and is of bad odor in Ohio, where predictions of how much revenue the four casinos would bring in after the law passed authorizing them were way off the mark. Revenues were about half of what was predicted.
Masurekar says sports betting revenues won’t be as big as most people suppose. “Sports betting is not a money generator, even in Vegas. It’s more of a traffic genera-tor,” he said.
On the other hand, it is likely to spark interest among the younger, more well off customers that casino owners are trying desperately to flag down on their way to other entertainment venues.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are moving forward on the “placeholder” bills. State Senator John Eklund, one of the bills’ sponsors, told News 5 Cleveland, “What we’re doing over in the Senate is we’re assembling a list of parties who might be interested in this particular type of legislation, anticipating that we will take a series of meetings with them to sort of get the lay of the land and to sort of see where people’s temperature is.”
The senator added, “Starting with that process do the necessary investigation we have to do to come up with a concrete proposal that we would then present to the general assembly in some sort of an amended bill or a substitute bill.”
Rep. David Greenspan says they want to get the bill right the first time. “We’re looking at this with a holistic approach,” he said. “We have no pre-conceived timeline as to when we want to introduce some-thing as the bill comes together. We’re going to work together with the Senate and the house to come up with a comprehensive bill.”
He predicted the two chambers would work collaboratively to benefit the state and help the economy. That means striking a balance between a tax structure that generates revenue but doesn’t stifle the industry.
Eklund concluded, “We’re at the very early stages but heaven knows there’s plenty of interest been ex-pressed about this and we intend to be very deliberative and thoughtful in how we go about investigating this.”
