One of the hot topics at last week’s U.S. Sports Betting Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. was the ability of Native American tribes with casinos to operate sports betting. More specifically, the general counsel for the National Indian Gaming Commission addressed the case of the Pueblo of Santa Ana tribe in New Mexico.
The tribe has already opened a sports book at its Santa Ana Star Casino & Hotel—despite the fact that New Mexico has not passed a bill to legalize sports betting. Santa Ana is the first tribe to so test the legality of sports betting in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s removal of the federal ban on sports wagering in the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.
At the summit, NIGC General Counsel Michael Hoenig noted that Santa Ana has satisfied two conditions he feels must be present for tribes to offer sports betting where the state has not authorized it—there is no outright state prohibition of sports betting, and it is not on the list of prohibited Class III games in the tribal-state compact.
“New Mexico doesn’t have any law that I’m aware of… that explicitly prohibits sports betting, and they have a compact that says that the tribe can offer any Class III game,” Hoenig said. “So there’s no prohibition against sports betting and sports betting is a Class III game, so they’re taking the position, I believe, that under their compact they can offer sports betting.”
The tribe’s compact, he continued, has no specific prohibition of sports betting. Their compact, for example, just specifies that the tribe can operate all class-III games; that’s it,” Hoenig said.
That may not be “it” going forward, he cautioned. “I think under IGRA the way it’s written now, if a state is allowing its commercial operations to offer sports betting there’s no question that the tribe should be able to offer sports betting as well. And they may need to possibly renegotiate their compact. The gray area is where there’s no prohibition and there’s no outright allowance, which I think is what we’re seeing in sports betting because some states couldn’t authorize it in the past. But they didn’t want to make it illegal either, so there’s just this kind of gray area.”
