• Home

Read more about the
Las Vegas 2024 Super
Bowl Streaker!

New Mexico has a complex gambling history. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by the House in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to get on the Native casino craze. Politics assured that wouldn’t be the situation.

The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a task force in Nineteen Ninety to draft a compact with New Mexico Amerindian bands. When the task force arrived at an accord with 2 important local bands a year later, the Governor declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.

When a new governor took over in Nineteen Ninety Five, it appeared that Native gambling in New Mexico was a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson passed the contract with the Native bands, anti-gambling groups were able to tie the accord up in the courts. A New Mexico court found that Governor Johnson had out stepped his bounds in signing the accord, thus denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues 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 accord between the Government of New Mexico and its Native tribes. A decade had been squandered for gaming in New Mexico, which includes Indian casino Bingo.

The non-profit Bingo industry has grown from 1999. In that year, New Mexico non-profit game operators acquired only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have grown steadily since that time. Two Thousand and Five saw the largest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the operators.

Bingo is certainly popular in New Mexico. All kinds of owners try for a bit of the pie. Hopefully, the politicos are done batting over gambling as a hot button issue like they did back in the 1990’s. That’s without doubt wishful thinking.

Log in