New Mexico has a stormy gaming background. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was signed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to cash in on the American Indian casino craze. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the situation.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King assembled a working group in Nineteen Ninety to draft a contract with New Mexico Native bands. When the panel came to an accord with 2 big local tribes a year later, Governor King declined to sign the bargain. He would hold up a deal until 1994.
When a new governor took office in Nineteen Ninety Five, it seemed that American Indian gaming in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson signed the accord with the Amerindian bands, anti-gaming forces were able to tie the contract up in the courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the deal, thus denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It required the CNA, signed by the New Mexico house, to get the process moving on a full accord amongst the Government of New Mexico and its Native bands. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, which includes Amerindian casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo business has gotten bigger since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico not for profit game operators acquired just $3,048 in revenues. That climbed to $725,150 in 2000, and passed one million dollars in 2001. Non-profit Bingo revenues have grown steadily since that time. Two Thousand and Five witnessed the largest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.
Bingo is apparently favored in New Mexico. All sorts of operators look for a slice of the action. Hopefully, the politicians are done batting around gaming as a hot button issue like they did back in the 90’s. That is without doubt wishful thinking.
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