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State has little oversight on charity gambling
Listen to this articleANNAPOLIS — In the hyper-regulated realm of Maryland casino gambling, potential operators undergo extensive background checks well before the first bet is collected and, if selected, pay a tax on gamblers’ losses that ranks among the nation’s highest.
But if a business or charity wants to do some gambling on a smaller scale — well, that’s a different story.
In a meeting of the Joint Committee on Gaming Oversight on Thursday, officials with the Maryland State Lottery and Gaming Control Agency described a statewide regulator’s nightmare: well more than a dozen potential games of chance where money changes hands played across every Maryland jurisdiction, most for charity, and all with different rules governing them.
State gambling regulators have no authority over such games, such as paddle wheel, bingo, billiards, tip jars and filmed horse races, and have nary the resources to take on such oversight.
Instead, locals have devised their own rules, including one in Montgomery County that prohibits more than two free-play pinball games on a single floor of a building, and another in Carroll County that prohibits billiards from being played except on a particular day in a senior center.
The overwhelming number of games played across the state in bingo halls and volunteer fire stations, coupled with the decades-old local ordinances that govern them, suggests a state that has tremendous oversight of commercial casinos in the form of numerous commissions and legislative committees, yet is unable to monitor gambling at the local level.
Using phrases such as “vast” and “strikingly different” to describe each county’s rules governing charitable card games, raffles and roulette, lottery Chief of Staff Jaclyn L. Vincent told a panel of state lawmakers that a number of people could make full-time jobs out of watching over such events.
“There is a wide range of regulations … at the local level,” said Vincent, also the lottery’s director of gaming research. “The inconsistencies create loopholes that I think lack clarity for people trying to figure out the rules.”
At one point, Vincent said a “lack of standard reporting” by organizations holding charitable gambling events made it difficult to know for sure how many such events take place, let alone how much money is made.
There are also commercial bingo parlors in Anne Arundel and Calvert counties — where machines that look, sound and seem to gamblers no different than a slot machine are allowed to operate — that do business with varying degrees of county regulation.
The lottery does have jurisdiction over those machines, and will also regulate similar ones at American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars halls across the state, perhaps starting in 2014. The rest are handled by local governments, creating a confusing situation for organizations eager to earn money through gambling revenue.
Del. Eric G. Luedtke, a Montgomery County Democrat who chairs the House of Delegates committee that oversees gambling matters and is co-chair of the joint gambling panel of four senators and four delegates, said it was worth looking into what, if anything, regulators could do to bring local gambling under state monitoring.
At least 28 states and Washington, D.C., regulate local charitable gambling, Vincent said.
Del. Melvin L. Stukes, a Baltimore Democrat and a supporter of gambling in the city, said the state ought to stay away from the issue. During this year’s session of the General Assembly, Stukes sponsored legislation that would have let for-profit organizations run charity gambling events for nonprofits in the city.
Organizations seeking to run such events have in the past pulled out of Baltimore, Stukes said, costing the city as much as $300,000 in at least one instance.
“All we need to do is let the locals do what they need to do,” he said.
The Joint Committee on Gaming Oversight was created during the 2012 special legislative session in which lawmakers agreed to expand casino gambling in Maryland, including allowing a casino in Prince George’s County, and table games such as blackjack and roulette at all six authorized commercial casinos in the state.
The panel is required to submit a report to the governor and legislature in December that reviews the state’s gambling laws.
