With no private developer willing to step up to the plate for a Chicago casino, Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) is now pitching a city/state partnership. Why not? There won’t be any profits to divide. State Rep. Greg Harris (D), for one, isn’t buying it. He points out that the usurious 72% tax rate on the Windy City casino is baked deep into the omnibus gaming package that the Lege passed last session.
That mobbed-up Rosemont casino that never happened continues to haunt Illinois politics. Video-gambling operator Rick Heidner‘s ties to some of the same principals cost him a piece of land he needed to build a racetrack and racino at Tinley Park. After Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) vetoed the transaction, Heidner “swore that the Gaming Board knew of his relationships with Parkway Bank Chairman Rocco Suspenzi [who hid his ownership stake in the Rosemont casino] and convicted felon Dominic Buttitta, and had no problem with the ties when it awarded him a video gambling license in 2012. Heidner also acknowledged that he remains in business with the people ‘in question.'” (Not stopping there, he’s pleading with Lightfoot to bring slot routes to Chicago.)
Maybe the Gaming Board should have performed more due diligence the first time around, as Heidner is the kind of figure who keeps giving Illinois a bad name. You couldn’t associate with a felon and hope for a Nevada gaming license. You could certainly make a case for revoking Heidner’s license when it comes up for review in February. Meanwhile, Hawthorne Race Course President Tim Carey, Heidner’s partner in Tinley Park, said he was in search of “new options” for the racino. The whole thing seems to be karmic payback for trying to build a racino on the site of a mental health center, something Illinois needs more than additional slot machines.
When presented with Heidner and Carey’s plans for Tinley Park, Racing Board Chairman Jeffrey Brincat enthused, “I enjoy seeing a presentation from my friend Tim Carey, and … what I hope is going to be a new friend, Rick Heidner. But that’s not why the administration has us up here. It’s to look out for Illinois racing.” There should have been a laugh track.
* Florida politicians are experiencing life after tribal revenue sharing. True, state Sen. 
Wilton Simpson (R, right) appeared to have pulled the fat from the fire, cooking up a deal with the Seminole Tribe that would have reasserted their exclusivity to designated-player games like blackjack in return for at least $500 million a year, a $150 million increase. Sounds good, right? Not to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who screwed the pooch by demanding more time—too much time—to study Simpson’s recipe. Now, “The underlying point is, financially, we’ve moved on from the tribe. We didn’t rely on the revenue share last budget and there’s no reason to believe we have to recreate that revenue share going forward,” says state Sen. Bill Galvano (R), point man for gaming in the Lege.
Moving on, in Galvano’s view, involves reversing field and codifying designated-player games with private-sector parimutuels, authorizing daily fantasy sports (previously anathema), sports betting, higher bet limits, etc. It’s Christmas for the parimutuels. The only difficulty is that the Lege dealt itself out of making gaming-policy changes after too many years of ineptitude. Now it proposes and 
the general-election voter disposes. Galvano (left) wants to unwind the constitutional amendment that puts voters in the driver’s seat, but he’s going to have to go against Disney and the Seminoles to win that argument. (“The Legislature neither has the authority to enact or propose an expansion of casino gambling in the state. Period,” says campaign mastermind John Sowinski.) Lawmakers can still regulate parimutuels, so Galvano might push some incremental changes through that window. As Speaker of the House José Oliva (R) puts it, “We also have to make sure that if an exclusivity is going to be granted [to the Seminoles], that that exclusivity is properly compensated.” Florida, meanwhile, has to get used to budgeting without $350 million in Seminole exclusivity fees, never mind the $500 million that DeSantis booted.
