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Bingo rule changes anger tribes

Proposed changes that would differentiate casino bingo from slot machines would cut into tribes' profits.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published September 21, 2006

WASHINGTON - At some Indian casinos, including the Seminole Hard Rock in Tampa, they're not playing your grandmother's church basement bingo anymore. Now the game is video bingo, played at blinking, whirring consoles virtually indistinguishable from slot machines.

Slots are subject to state approval and limits. Bingo machines aren't.

Concerned that tribes are blurring the line between the two, federal regulators are trying to clarify the difference.

New rules proposed by the National Indian Gaming Commission would slow play at video bingo terminals, mandate more player participation and require screen space to be devoted to a bingo display, making it more clear to customers that they are playing bingo rather than a slot machine.

But the draft rules face angry opposition from Indian tribes. Some rely on video bingo to supplement their state-allowed quota of slot machines, or use the devices because they can't get state permission to run slots.

"This is serious. This is people's lives at stake here," Marjorie Mejia, chairwoman of Northern California's Lytton Band of Pomo Indians, told gaming commission officials at a daylong public hearing Tuesday. "These proposed regulations are of great concern."

The Lytton Band hasn't won permission from California lawmakers for slot machines. It gets all its revenue from 937 electronic bingo machines. Tribal officials fear such machines would no longer be allowed under the new rules, and the slower machines that would be permitted wouldn't appeal to gamblers.

"It's really termination for my people," Mejia said.

Mejia was among the tribal officials offering emotional testimony against the proposed rules, which come as tribal gambling has exploded into a $22-billion-a-year industry.

"The games that would be permitted under the proposed regulations would be extraordinarily expensive to produce and have little commercial viability" said Charlie Lombardo, vice president of gaming operations with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The proposal is "very unfair to tribes," he said.

Perhaps 20 percent of that revenue comes from video bingo and similar machines, the Indian gaming commission says, the rest from slots and other Nevada-style games. The commission estimates there are some 50,000 video bingo machines at hundreds of Indian casinos around the country.

Video bingo is far less lucrative than slot machines. But since some tribes can't get state permission for slots or are limited to a certain number of such machines, they want to be able to offer the most profitable video bingo they can.

Video bingo games with names like Triple Double Red Hot 7s and Double Diamond Run Bingo are marketed based on their similarity to slot machines.

As with slots, a gambler punches a button to set reels spinning. But tribes say the machines are still fundamentally bingo because they require at least two gamblers to play each other over a linked network.

Slot machines, by contrast, involve a gambler interacting only with a single machine.

But National Indian Gaming Commission chairman Phil Hogen said that if his agency doesn't act to delineate the difference between video bingo and slots, the two will grow so indistinguishable that states might seek to control bingo.

The Justice Department has also tangled with tribes over whether video bingo is allowed, underscoring the need for more certainty, Hogen said.

"To say that the line is already clear, I so wish that were true. I would have spent the last three years a whole lot different than I did if that were true," Hogen told tribal leaders. "Clarity, I continue to think, is needed."

The commission's draft rules, open for public comment until Sept. 30, require gamblers to press a bingo machine's buttons more than once, as now can happen. There are seconds-long delays built in, instead of play happening nearly instantaneously. Fifty percent of a machine's screen must be displayed as bingo, and the machine must be clearly labeled as bingo.

[Last modified September 20, 2006, 23:18:28]