Mass. State Rep. Brad Hill is impatient at the snail’s pace the Bay State’s legislature has set in considering bills that would legalize sports betting. He compares it to trying to “reinvent the wheel.” Except in this case the legislation isn’t even on wheels; at best it’s on slow skids.
Since January the legislature has held many hearings on sports betting on more than a dozen bills, including two Hill authored. For a while it looked as though one might be adopted by the end of this year’s session. In time for the fans in one of the most sports conscious states in the country—home to the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots— to be able to bet on the upcoming NFL season, which begins in September.
But it hasn’t happened. Two other New England states have legalized sports book. The most recent is New Hampshire, which adopted a mobile platform option that doesn’t require brick and mortar retail operations to make a bet. Last year Rhode Island legalized sports betting, and in March it added on mobile sports betting.
Massachusetts isn’t even close. The legislature’s summer recess is rapidly approaching.
The lawmaker highlighted his frustration last week when he was interviewed by Sports Handle. “I want to get us up and running because there is another football season nearly upon us,” he said. “We’re missing a huge opportunity for revenue in this state. … Massachusetts likes to gamble, we like our sports, and I should be able, as a citizen, to go bet on a football game. Why is this taking so long? We’re not reinventing the wheel here.”
In May the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies was due to hold a series of hearings when the leadership in both chambers decided that the issue was too complex to breeze through without a lot of study.
Finally, last week the committee held a hearing where Hill’s two bills were on the docket. One bill discusses where the revenues from sports betting would be spent. The other would create a regulatory scaffolding for sports book. The committee took no vote on the bills. Hill hopes that eventually an omnibus bill combining the best features of several bills will emerge from the committee. He believes that
Rep. Hill isn’t the only one champing at the bit at the delays in moving a bill. So are the biggest representatives of daily fantasy sports, DraftKings, a company born in Boston that wants to get cracking in its home state offering sports betting. So is the governor of the state, Charlie Baker, who is so anxious that he introduced his own bill in January and urged the legislature to act on it by August. Now that bill is just one of many.
Meanwhile, residents of the state will be able to cross the border into the Granite State to buy stuff without paying sales tax, and now make sports wagers.
