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Pa. lawmakers ask for investigations after gaming regulators met privately with casino lobbyists
Spotlight PA link: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2023/06/pa-parx-casino-gaming-control-board-lobbyist-investigations/
HARRISBURG — Two Pennsylvania lawmakers have requested investigations into the state Gaming Control Board following a Spotlight PA story that detailed how top officials met privately with casino lobbyists about a major competitor and failed to disclose the meeting on public logs required by the regulatory agency’s ethics rules.
State Sen. Gene Yaw (R., Lycoming) and state Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia) have asked the state attorney general’s office and the state Ethics Commission respectively to review the gaming board’s actions for compliance with the law, and review internal rules established to ensure the agency remains impervious to outside influence.
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Earlier this year, Spotlight PA reported that lobbyists for the state’s largest casino, Parx Casino in Bucks County, embarked on an intense, behind-the-scenes effort to get the Gaming Control Board to abandon its hands-off stance toward skill games. Skill games resemble slot machines and have proliferated over the past decade in convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, social clubs, and other locations statewide.
Unlike slot machines and other casino gambling, skill games are not regulated by the Gaming Control Board. Nor are they taxed at the high rate that casino slots are. As a result, the skill games industry has become a prime target for some casino executives and their array of lobbyists, who argue the machines are illegal and should be banned in the state. Those executives have mounted a fierce campaign away from public view to convince officials to help them rid the state’s gambling landscape of skill games, according to emails and other documents obtained by Spotlight PA.
State Sen. Gene Yaw (R., Lycoming) and state Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia) have asked the state attorney general’s office and the state Ethics Commission respectively to review the gaming board’s actions for compliance with the law, and review internal rules established to ensure the agency remains impervious to outside influence.
- snip -
Earlier this year, Spotlight PA reported that lobbyists for the state’s largest casino, Parx Casino in Bucks County, embarked on an intense, behind-the-scenes effort to get the Gaming Control Board to abandon its hands-off stance toward skill games. Skill games resemble slot machines and have proliferated over the past decade in convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, social clubs, and other locations statewide.
Unlike slot machines and other casino gambling, skill games are not regulated by the Gaming Control Board. Nor are they taxed at the high rate that casino slots are. As a result, the skill games industry has become a prime target for some casino executives and their array of lobbyists, who argue the machines are illegal and should be banned in the state. Those executives have mounted a fierce campaign away from public view to convince officials to help them rid the state’s gambling landscape of skill games, according to emails and other documents obtained by Spotlight PA.
- more at link -
"Skill games" are still gambling to the players who play on the machines. But to the casino owners, skill games are competing with legal casinos for customers and gambling profits. That's why the casinos are lobbying to get those so-called "skill games" banned in Pennsylvania.
