Maryland state Del. Eric Bromwell has failed in five straight attempts to get a bill out of committee to legalize slot machines at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. However, two factors offer a glimmer of hope for this year’s bill, currently before the House Ways and Means Committee.
For one, 13 of the committee’s 20 members are new, and have never voted against the proposal. “This is exciting,” committee Chairwoman Sheila Hixson told the Baltimore Sun. “Half of the group has never heard this before.”
Secondly, the airport has stopped actively opposing the plan, although the Maryland Aviation Administration is not supporting it either. “We’re not opposing it, we’re not supporting,” Dale Hilliard, the agency’s chief of staff, told the newspaper. “The new administration wanted to take a look at everything.”
While the concentration of slot machines under Bromwell’s bill would actually be greater at BWI than the slots at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, the slots would be tucked into corners of the airport, and placed behind security screeners. “We don’t want to be Nevada,” Bromwell told the Sun. “We don’t want these to line the terminals as you’re walking through BWI.”
Most observers say passage of the bill is a remote possibility. Should it somehow pass both houses of the legislature and be signed into law by Governor Larry Hogan, it would, as a constitutional amendment, have to be approved by voters in the 2016 general election.
Hogan has not taken a position on the bill.
