Nebraska Casino Bill Seeks to Provide Each Venue 50-Mile Monopoly, Critics Respond
Nebraska casinos are in development after voters signed away on a ballot referendum inward 2020. The state’s Racing and Gaming Commission sanctioned governing rules for commercial gambling last month, but a forthcoming bank bill seeks to check where casinos can buoy live located.
The Cornhusker State Legislature reconvened today to persist in its 2021-22 legislative session. State Sen. Tom Briese (R-Albion), who chairs the Legislature’s General Affairs Committee, says he testament presently present a measure that seeks to create buffer zones around the forthcoming casinos.
Briese plans to bow a statute that would bar the licensing of a commercial-grade casino anywhere within 50 miles of another casino. Under the 2020 ballot referendum, Nebraskans approved of allowing the state’s VI Equus caballus racetracks to become full-scale commercial message casinos with slot machines, table games, and sports betting.
The referendum, however, to boot allows unexampled venues that deal unrecorded gymnastic horse racing to seek gaming privileges.
Opponents React
Briese says his forthcoming gaming bank bill is necessary in dictate to protect NE from decorous flooded with casinos.
“As of correct now, at that place could follow a cassino on every I-80 alternate or inwards every county seat. That’s a slight exaggeration, but at that place could follow many, many casinos crosswise the state,” Briese opined.
Horsemen’s Park inward Omaha is already moving forrard with a $220 one thousand thousand investment to make for a gambling casino to the property. The Nebraska Racing and Gaming Commission in July proposed a unexampled raceway and casino called Belle Vue Downs, also inwards Omaha.
Briese’s bill, if passed past the general assembly and signed by Gov. Pete Ricketts (R), would block the Belle Vue Downs project. John Hassett, who owns Nebraska-based Advanced Gaming Technologies, a keno manipulator that conducts games at more than a dozen restaurants and bars across the state, says Briese’s efforts should follow rejected.
The government note would follow good for those [six] casino owners, but i don’t consider it’s ripe for Nebraska,” Hassett told 3NewsNow. “I don’t like the account and I don’t believe anybody inwards the nation should.”
Bellevue Mayor Rusty Hike doesn’t the likes of it either. He says the statute law would mental block competition.
“We would never require to demarcation line Omaha from something just because we had the first-class honours degree one, and it goes vice-versa, and it goes for any county in Cornhusker State really,” Hike declared.
Mutual Settlement
Hassett acknowledges wherefore Briese and the sextuplet racetracks might sustenance such a bill to cut back where casino licenses put up be issued. With Horsemen’s Mungo Park spending nearly a canton of a 1000000000000 dollars to build out its casino, it’s understandable wherefore the Horsemen’s ownership grouping would financial support a regional gaming monopoly.
But Hassett contends that spell 50 miles inward rural parts of the res publica power make sense, inward more impenetrable areas such as Omaha, the restriction testament keep NE from reaping the tax and economic benefits of permitting casinos.
A 50-mile gaming fender around Horsemen’s Mungo Park would encompass the totality of the President Lincoln capital, Bellevue, and Fremont. Those three cities combined experience a universe of just about 827,000 people, or nearly half of the state’s intact population.
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