The effort to bring two new casinos (HB 40) to Delaware was voted down in the House Gaming & Parimutuels Committee on a 6-5 vote.
My usual disclaimer is basically the point of this post — I don’t much care about a casino industry here in Delaware and I am especially opposed to relying on it for State operation revenue. Especially since the legislature is perfectly willing to protect venues destined to go into decline as they have to compete with other venues in MD and PA, when they *should* be in the business of encouraging competition. More competition will help the state hold on to more of that revenue for a longer period of time — although very likely at the risk of downsisizing some of the existing venues.
What I definitely don’t want to see is any of the current venues decline enough to be able to flex their checkbooks to leverage Delaware taxpayer dollars to prop them up any more than they have been. And as long as this Committee has doubled down on the status quo, they’ve quite firmly closed the door on a long term competitive solution. The executives of the current venues are already complaining about reduced revenues at their venues, using that to claim that the current market is saturated. Not quite sure how they decided that their problem is market saturation, but any Legislators that just buy that as a protectionist excuse are kicking the real can of problems down the road. And I want to go on record now as being against any effort to bail out these venues when the inevitable happens. If legislators are in the business of protecting anything, it ought to be protecting a revenue stream — NOT the specific venues.
Apparently this will come back up in an effort to get a full vote by the House. If it does, I’m hoping that Delawareans will tell their legislators that they should not be standing in the way of competition for these venues and let the most competitive survive.