New Mexico has a bitter gambling history. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was signed by the House in 1989, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to get on the Amerindian casino bandwagon. Politics guaranteed that would not be the situation.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King announced a task force in 1990 to draft a compact with New Mexico Native tribes. When the task force arrived at an accord with two prominent local bands a year later, Governor King refused to sign the bargain. He would hold up a deal until 1994.
When a new governor took office in Nineteen Ninety Five, it seemed that Native gaming in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when Governor Gary Johnson passed the accord with the American Indian bands, anti-gambling groups were able to hold the contract up in the courts. A New Mexico court found that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the accord, thereby denying the government of New Mexico hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It required the CNA, passed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full compact between the State of New Mexico and its Amerindian tribes. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, which includes Amerindian casino Bingo.
The non-profit Bingo business has gotten bigger since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico non-profit game providers acquired only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and passed one million dollars in revenues in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have increased constantly since that time. 2005 witnessed the greatest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.
Bingo is certainly popular in New Mexico. All sorts of owners try for a bit of the action. Hopefully, the politicos are through batting around gambling as a hot button issue like they did in the 1990’s. That is most likely wishful thinking.
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