Seminoles Strike Back Against Ballot Threats from LVS, DraftKings

All-powerful Florida tribal gaming manipulator the Seminoles are plowing millions of dollars into a unexampled political citizens committee called “Standing Up for Florida,” Florida Politics reports.

The federation of tribes is hoping to undermine efforts past out-of-state gaming companies that need to dispute its gambling monopolies via voter-led petitions.

“Standing Up for Florida” has kicked sour its cause with a TV and digital media advertizement titled “Watch Out, Florida.” The ad’s tagline is a quarter warning to voters: “Don’t Sign Petitions.”

Out-of-state gaming companies are disbursement tens of millions to turn our body politic into another Las Vegas. They need to alteration our formation to take into account out-of-control play with no more guarantees for us and large profits for them,” the TV bit claims.

The Seminoles carry a virtual monopoly on casino gaming in Sunshine State (bar a fistful of slots licensees inward Broward and Miami-Dade counties) at their septenary Hard Rock-branded casinos, and they need it to continue that way. They also at present make a monopoly on sports betting, thanks to a young thickset concord negotiated with Gov. Bokkos DeSantis.

Voters in Charge?

While the tribe does not make these serious out-of-staters, its targets are clear. LVS Corp and its powerful lobbyists make been sniffing around Florida for years inwards the hope that someone power net ball them build a casino resort.

Now the Las Vegas-based companionship has teamed upward with Alabama’s Poarch Band of Creek Indians on a ballot initiative called “Florida Voters inward Charge.”

The initiative asks voters to commute the state makeup to reserve pari-mutuel scorecard rooms in North Sunshine State to turn fully fledged casinos, provided they are 130 miles out from the Seminole reservation.

Theoretically, this could earmark LVS or the Poarch Creek to purchase a card elbow room that could and so follow transformed into a cassino holiday resort inwards or around the Jacksonville area.

Meanwhile, DraftKings and FanDuel want voters to backward a to a greater extent inclusive nomadic sports betting market, specifically single that includes them.

This is via their committee, “Florida Education Champions,” which promises that disrupting the Seminole monopoly testament bring more revenue to schools.

As the Seminoles line inwards their campaign, they make up $500 billion to the commonwealth for each one year. And they would hold a slip to renegotiate inwards this figure downwards if “Florida Education Champions'” visual sensation of all time became a reality.

The 2 initiatives want 891,589 signatures from registered commonwealth voters to live placed on the ballot in 2022.

Could Amendment 3 Backfire?

Ironically, the folk championed a ballot initiative of their possess indorse inward 2018. At elections that year, Sunshine State residents passed Amendment 3, which naturalized that all gambling casino gaming expanding upon must be approved past voters in a public ballot.

The campaign was bankrolled by the Seminoles with the help of Disney. And despite the tribe’s electric current advice non to subscribe petitions inwards general, it got the necessary signatures, and ultimately the votes, to go law.

The tribe believed this would facilitate safeguard their monopoly, because it would keep the legislative body from approbatory laws that benefited commercial gaming interests.

But it also gave a lot of “interfering out-of-staters” an alfresco chance of gaining the sort of strand inwards FL that the general assembly has resisted for years.