The Coy Calculations for Sports Betting

I’ve got a post on Tiverton Fact Check that might be of some interest statewide.  Most of it has to do with the increased expectations for revenue from the Twin Rivers location soon to open in town (which argues against the pessimism that some have about estimates in the 2.9%-tax-reduction budget that I submitted for a vote this week at the financial town referendum [FTR]).  But the introduction of the topic of sports betting has broader implications:

Also this week, the United States Supreme Court “struck down a 1992 federal law… that effectively banned commercial sports betting in most states,” as a New York Times article put it.  Expecting this outcome, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo had already included a provision in her proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year suggesting that referendum votes across the state and in Lincoln and Tiverton had already provided authority for the state to conduct sports betting.  She estimated $23.5 million for the state from this source.

However, no language yet exists describing whether this betting would count as a VLT, table game, or something else.  Therefore, although Rhode Island is apparently planning to allow only in-person betting, probably at the two Twin Rivers locations, how much the host communities would receive from these transactions is not yet known.  State officials are coy on the matter, even on the way in which the $23.5 million estimate was calculated, but it is clear that negotiations are underway.

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I haven’t been able to find any evidence of how the state thinks this money should be attributed or any calculation that led the governor to estimate her millions, even after communicating with multiple state departments.

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