(Disclosure: Rose Law Group represents PGA tour)
By Richard Ruela Arizona Republic
Gov. Doug Ducey had been elected on a platform of tax cuts, but entered office facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and a growing state that needed more revenue. In his first month as governor, he sought a way out of this financial pickle by asking his chief of staff, Kirk Adams, to see if the tribes would refashion the gaming compacts.
Ducey needed the state to get more cash from gambling, Adams said, but he wanted any changes to be low-key. He didn’t want to change the culture of Arizona.
“I don’t want to see a casino in downtown Phoenix,” Adams recalled Ducey saying to him in January 2015.
Those two directives seemed to conflict, Adams said during an extensive interview in which he detailed the years of closed-door negotiations. He was to allow an expansion of gaming, one that would eventually include possible sports books in cities, while somehow not turning Arizona into a gambling mecca like Las Vegas.
“Those were the two guardrails we constantly tried to stay between,” Adams said.The Republic sought to piece together the long path that led to a reformation of legal gambling in Arizona, which culminates in the opening of sports books in Arizona cities at the beginning of the National Football League season. A handful of lawmakers talked about the process. However, no tribal leaders agreed to do follow-up interviews.
In the end, Gov. Ducey got what he wanted — the expansion of gaming, including sports betting within the urban areas that one lawmaker told his colleagues was estimated to net $100 million in bets annually.
Whether that expansion would change the culture in Arizona remains to be seen.
