New Mexico has a stormy gaming background. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress in 1989, it seemed like New Mexico would be one of the states to cash in on the Native casino craze. Politics assured that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King assembled a task force in Nineteen Ninety to discuss a compact with New Mexico American Indian tribes. When the working group came to an accord with two big local tribes a year later, the Governor declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took office in 1995, it seemed that Amerindian gambling in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor passed the accord with the Indian bands, anti-gaming groups were able to hold the contract up in courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the deal, thereby denying the state of New Mexico hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees over the next several years.
It took the Compact Negotiation Act, passed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the ball rolling on a full contract between the Government of New Mexico and its American Indian bands. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, which includes Native casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo business has grown from Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico charity game owners acquired just $3,048. That climbed to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have increased constantly since then. Two Thousand and Five saw the biggest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the operators.
Bingo is clearly beloved in New Mexico. All kinds of operators look for a bit of the pie. Hopefully, the politicians are through batting around gaming as a hot button factor like they did in the 1990’s. That’s without doubt hopeful thinking.
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