New York’s legislature has until Wednesday to act if the state is going to have legal sports betting this year.
That’s when the Senate and Assembly adjourn for 2018, and it means, obviously, that the odds are rather long.
Lawmakers would have to fashion a single bill from separate measures in the Senate and Assembly. Both would regulate wagering at casinos, racinos and OTBs, including on-site and via mobile platforms, but they leave considerable room for disagreement on one of the more controversial issues surrounding legalization𑁋namely, a revenue carve-out for the sports leagues, which are demanding a cut of the action in return for supplying statistics and other data and to offset the costs of protecting the integrity of their games.
Then there are the state’s three casino tribes to be factored in.
The Senate bill is reported to have the support of the Republican majority in the upper house, but the Assembly’s Democratic Speaker Carl Heastie has said he’s gotten mixed signals from his members, and Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo has said it will take more time to fashion a politically palatable agreement that satisfies all the numerous stakeholders.
It could be that the best to be hoped for this year is the creation of a legislative task force to study the online implications, as proposed by a separate Assembly bill introduced earlier this year. The bill calls for the task force to report its findings and make recommendations by the end of 2019.
