New Mexico has a rocky gaming history. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress in 1989, it seemed like New Mexico might be one of the states to get on the American Indian casino craze. Politics assured that wouldn’t be the case.
The New Mexico governor Bruce King assembled a working group in Nineteen Ninety to create a contract with New Mexico American Indian tribes. When the task force came to an agreement with 2 big local tribes a year later, Governor King declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took over in 1995, it seemed that American Indian gaming in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor signed the contract with the Indian bands, anti-gaming 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 compact, thus denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.
It took the CNA, signed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full accord between the State of New Mexico and its Native tribes. A decade had been burned for gaming in New Mexico, which includes Native casino Bingo.
The nonprofit Bingo business has grown from 1999. In that year, New Mexico not for profit game operators acquired just $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 grown constantly since that time. 2005 saw the largest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the owners.
Bingo is clearly favored in New Mexico. All sorts of owners look for a bit of the action. Hopefully, the politicians are done batting over gaming as an important issue like they did back in the 1990’s. That’s without doubt wishful thinking.
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