By Colin A. Young
BOSTON – The House has overwhelmingly approved a bill to legalize sports betting in Massachusetts, but even before the vote, the question of whether to allow wagers on college sports emerged as a major sticking point between the House and the Senate.
The House voted 156-3 on Thursday to pass its sports betting bill, something a bipartisan parade of representatives said was long overdue.
Some said they hoped the House’s lopsided vote would send a message to the Senate, which has been less enthusiastic about sports betting.
“I represent a district which borders New Hampshire,” said Rep. Andy Vargas, of Haverhill. “In Haverhill, you can literally walk across the border into New Hampshire and place a bet. I know that my constituents who partake in sports wagering would rather place these bets in their homes and in their own state and would rather have any revenue collected going towards benefiting their home state of Massachusetts.”
For Rep. Dan Cahill, of Lynn, Thursday’s vote was about something even simpler.
“Most important, it’s just fun. People are allowed to have fun,” he said. “And sports betting is fun.”
But even before the House voted, House Speaker Ronald Mariano, D-Quincy, declared that leaving collegiate betting out of any bill “probably would be” a deal-breaker.
“I find myself having a tough time trying to justify going through all of this to not include probably the main driver of betting in the commonwealth,” he said on Bloomberg Baystate Radio.
Massachusetts has been considering whether to expand gambling here since the U.S. Supreme Court in May 2018 ruled that the nearly nationwide prohibition on sports wagering was unconstitutional.
“Some may say that this is bringing sports betting to Massachusetts. The fact is that our Massachusetts residents are already betting on sports. They’re either taking that short drive up to New Hampshire or to Rhode Island, where it’s legal, or they’re also going on their phones and using offshore applications, those sportsbooks, to bet or they’re also going to a bookie,” Rep. Jerald Parisella, who chairs the Committee on Economic Development, said while outlining the bill for the House on Thursday. “But what this does do is it brings it out of the shadows and into the light, and makes it legal in Massachusetts.”
Thirty states, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and New York, have authorized gamblers to place legal bets on sports in some fashion. Meanwhile, illicit gambling continues to attract bettors in Massachusetts.
“We’re surrounded,” Parisella said.
The House bill would put sports betting under the purview of the Gaming Commission, require that all bettors be at least 21 years old and physically present in Massachusetts, and implement consumer safeguards to protect against problem gambling similar to those put in place for casinos when Massachusetts expanded gambling in 2011.
Sports betting sites
MGM Springfield, Encore Boston Harbor, Plainridge Park Casino, the state’s two simulcasting facilities and racetracks that host live horse racing (right now the only one is at Plainridge Park) would be granted licenses to take in-person wagers as long as they meet rules and requirements of the Gaming Commission.
More:Massachusetts is one of the last states in New England without sports betting. For now.
They would be allowed to have between one and three mobile sports betting platforms, depending on the facility. Mobile-only operators could also seek licenses and every license would carry a $5 million fee.
“We estimate if all those licenses go out, the commonwealth could get $70 million to $80 million just in licensing fees,” Parisella said Thursday.
A sportsbook’s revenue from in-person bets would be taxed at 12.5 percent and revenue from mobile wagers at 15 percent. Parisella said the higher tax on mobile operators recognizes the added costs that brick-and-mortar facilities would have and aims to drive customers to businesses that employ people in Massachusetts.
“I believe a conservative estimate is that we’ll raise about $60 million annually from the taxes on the sports betting,” Parisella said, citing a number higher than most previous estimates for sports betting in Massachusetts. “And as it gets matured, we believe that those numbers could rise.”
If college betting is not allowed, Mariano said, the revenue estimate would drop to between $25 million and $35 million annually.
An additional 1 percent tax would be levied on wagers placed on sporting events held in Massachusetts, to be distributed proportionately between the facilities that hosted the events to be used for “sports wagering security and integrity.”
The House bill would allow wagers on the outcome of college sports contests, but not on the performances of individual college athletes.
Whether to allow bets on college athletics has been a recurring theme in the three years that lawmakers have spent considering sports betting, and it is shaping up as the most significant difference between the House bill and Sen. Eric Lesser’s sports betting bill. That legislation is before the Senate Ways and Means Committee and is expected to be the Senate’s vehicle if or when it takes up the issue.
“If we are going to get a bill done, we both have to move,” Mariano said on Bloomberg when asked about the different feelings toward collegiate betting in the House and the Senate.
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Through a Rep. Paul McMurtry amendment, the House on Thursday added a provision to its sports betting bill that would allow the Gaming Commission to grant licenses to let some veterans’ organizations operate up to five slot machines. That is also likely to be a point of divergence with the Senate.
Before the House debate Thursday, Lesser said the Senate is “ready to do this, if it’s done the right way.”
“I think we’re ready. Look, it’s been three years since the Supreme Court allowed states to move forward on sports betting. Since then you went from two states – New Jersey and Nevada – that had sports betting markets to 30. And again, almost all of our neighbors in almost all the states in the Northeast now have it,” Lesser, the Senate chair of the Economic Development Committee, said Thursday morning on NESN. “So it’s time. It’s time for Massachusetts to do this.”
House, Senate summer break
The House and the Senate are expected to take a summer break soon and it’s unclear when the Senate plans to take up a sports betting bill. Like the House, the Senate largely takes its workload one week at a time.
Though he said he thought the end of 2021 is a realistic expectation for sports betting to launch in Massachusetts, Lesser said “the Senate will, may or may not take something up in the near future.”
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The House approved sports betting legalization last summer as part of an economic development bill, but the Senate turned down multiple opportunities to do the same. Lesser told the regional sports network that senators will likely key in on problem gambling and consumer protections if or when they debate the issue this session.
“It is, at the end of the day, a gambling product, and we do need to remember that. We have a lot of senators that are concerned about that and want to make sure that people who might have an addiction, people who might fall prey to bad activity, are protected,” he said. “So we’re going to make sure that any bill … has a lot of consumer protections in place and really sets a high standard for the quality of play.”
Gov. Charlie Baker, who would be asked to sign any sports betting bill the Legislature passes, filed his own bill to legalize the activity and has repeatedly written $35 million in sports betting revenue into his annual budget proposals.
The Gaming Commission, which would write the specific regulations for sports betting and oversee the activity under nearly every proposal on Beacon Hill, has remained neutral in the sports betting debate, but Executive Director Karen Wells has said the agency is doing what it can now to prepare for the possibility that it gets a new responsibility.
“We recognize that there is a significant interest in getting this going. I hear these representatives and senators talking about the finances and the money to the commonwealth, so we recognize there’s a public interest in us getting going as soon as we can,” she said last month during a hearing on the topic.
