The laws that constrain casinos in Louisiana may tie their hands behind their backs in the contest with casinos in nearby states. And the Pelican State’s lawmakers are starting to notice since when the casinos do badly, tax revenues suffer.
Currently gaming pays $426 million into the state.
That’s why the legislature created the Riverboat Economic Development and Gaming Task Force this year. It is tasked with meeting over the next two years to study how gaming can be improved in the state. It will make recommendations to Governor John Bel Edwards and the legislature a short time before the 2018 legislative session.
Recently a lawmaker complained about seeing a billboard in Shreveport that advertised the WinStar World Casino in Oklahoma, one of the largest casinos in the country.
Louisiana law limits casinos to 30,000 square feet of gaming space, i.e. the deck space of a riverboat. The law also limits how many riverboats may operate on a “designated waterway,” to six licenses. The state is one of the few that has riverboat casinos as its main source of gaming.
The WinStar has more than 600,000 SF of gaming space. The Oklahoma casino is much closer to the important Dallas-Fort Worth market than Shreveport—just a 45-minute drive. That’s a heavy blow since Shreveport-Bossier City once had a near monopoly on that market.
A legislator who represents the area recently complained, “The Shreveport market has gone from being Number One in the state and one of the leading markets in the country to now being somewhere behind Lake Charles.”
