New Mexico has a rocky gaming background. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by the House in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it seemed 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 assembled a panel in 1990 to create a contract with New Mexico Amerindian tribes. When the working group arrived at an accord with two big local tribes a year later, Governor King refused to sign the bargain. He would hold up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.
When a new governor took office in Nineteen Ninety Five, it seemed that Native wagering in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor signed the accord with the Indian bands, anti-wagering groups were able to hold the accord up in the courts. A New Mexico court found that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing a deal, therefore denying the state 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 contract amongst the State of New Mexico and its Indian tribes. A decade had been lost for gambling in New Mexico, which includes Native casino Bingo.
The non-profit Bingo industry has grown from Nineteen Ninety-Nine. That year, New Mexico non-profit game operators acquired only $3,048. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and exceeded a million dollars in 2001. Nonprofit Bingo revenues have increased constantly since that time. 2005 saw the largest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.
Bingo is categorically beloved in New Mexico. All sorts of providers try for a bit of the pie. Hopefully, the politicians are through batting around gambling as an important issue like they did in the 1990’s. That is probably hopeful thinking.