DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR “DEEMS” NM TRIBAL GAMBLING COMPACTS IN EFFECT
performed the final step for the Navajo Nation, the Jicarilla Apache and Mescalero Apache tribes, and the Acoma Pueblo in renewing their gambling compacts by…doing nothing. When the D of I fails to act after 45 days of receipt from the governor, the compacts are “deemed to be in effect.” The Jemez Pueblo got their first compact out of the same negotiations.
The compacts had passed the legislature earlier this year in the regular legislative session, and the governor signed them a couple of weeks later. Interior studied them, but their only action was to make some remarks critical of the state for increasing the revenue sharing from the tribes. Interior didn’t criticize the tribes for running the casinos 24 hours a day, or allowing the tribes to give “markers” (credit) to the gamblers, or relieving them of responsibility when gamblers get drunk at their casinos and cause property damage or injury on their way home. Somehow the tribes almost never provoke criticism from the Department of Interior.
An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican said officials expected the revenue sharing to the state from all of the tribal casinos to go from $66 million last year to $77 million in 2019, a better than sixteen percent increase. That sounds wildly optimistic, considering their net win and revenue sharing has declined the past two years in a row. This is very typical of the gambling industry and their enabling officials–they always make wildly exaggerated claims of benefit to the state when talking of the rosy gambling future. The advancing years are always filled with broken promises social wreckage. Time to abandon the failed governmental program of predatory gambling.
