A STEALTH PLAN FOR SLOT MACHINES GAMBLING INDUSTRY ATTEMPTS TO BYPASS VOTERS

Opinion/Commentary/Editorial
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
April 21, 2004

Colorado voters pulled the plug on video-lottery terminals at racetracks last year after the priciest initiative campaign in state history. Amendment 33, which would have introduced slot-machine-style gambling at five Front Range racetracks from Loveland to Pueblo, was buried under a landslide of opposition statewide. It was the fourth time Coloradans issued a resounding "no" to expanding casino-style gambling since 1990, when voters approved limited-stakes poker, blackjack and one-armed bandits in Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek.

Not to be deterred by democracy, the horse and dog racing industry's two best friends, Rep. Al White and Sen. Ken Chlouber, have struck back with a vengeance by repackaging last year's failed initiative as House Bill 1437.

The bill's modus operandi is a computer game whose makers and promoters insist meets the requirement for pari-mutuel wagering. "Instant Racing" machines have a video screen that plays reruns from a library of more than 50,000 races. Program numbers spin on a video display like cherries spin on a video-lottery terminal. The machines accept cash or vouchers, but pay only in vouchers. The money wagered through the machines goes into a pool and is paid out according to pari-mutuel standards.

In the three states that have legalized Instant Racing, the takeout rate of 8 percent to 12 percent is roughly the same cut the house gets for slot machines, and horse or dog racers get 15 percent for purses. In addition, racetracks that provide videotapes of previously run races are paid 3 percent, an amount comparable to fees paid for simulcast signals.

This is exactly the kind of gambling racket that is garnering a larger share of the pari-mutuel industry. Live racing is fast losing its allure in the contemporary video-game culture.

The problem is, for all intents and purposes, Instant Racing is a slot machine without the handle. It's true the player does not know what the final odds are on a race until after all betting has ended, meaning there's some "skill" involved, too. But bettors can allow the computer to select the winner and simply view the end of a race. Hitting that "quick-pick" button takes about as much skill as the lottery games voters rejected last year when they gave the big thumbs down to Amendment 33.

Current law limits simulcasting races to days only when live racing is taking place, and to one simulcast facility per racetrack. In lifting the latter restriction, HB 1437 could breed a potential litter of off-track betting sites throughout the state.

As a stealth version of the ballot measure, HB 1437 seems yet another example of Chlouber's mad design to breathe life into the state's racing industry. Last week, we took him to task for a hare-brained piece of legislation that would move the regulation of racing to the Department of Agriculture.

Unlike Amendment 33, however, HB 1437 doesn't even make a pretense of specifying how Instant Racing revenues would be spent or analyze how local communities would be impacted. But that's what we'd expect from a bill that would make the state ever more dependent on gambling.

This bill provokes an eerie sense of deja vu, and as such lawmakers ought to kill it outright in committee, just as voters overwhelmingly rejected Amendment 33.

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