Council urges halt to altering slot laws

BANGOR – After having witnessed the barrage of slots-related bills that went before state lawmakers last session, city councilors are calling for a three-year waiting period before any substantive changes are made to existing state law.

A resolve urging the state’s legislative and executive branches to support a three-year moratorium on further changes to state slots law will appear on the council’s Sept. 24 meeting agenda. The resolve was among the city issues tackled during a meeting Wednesday of the council’s business and economic development committee, chaired by Councilor Dan Tremble.

The idea is to allow some time to study the effects of current regulations before making substantive changes that could either scuttle or expand slots operations in Maine, City Manager Edward Barrett said. The moratorium would not apply to minor technical changes, he said.

“For three years, no [changes], whether positive, negative or indifferent. Leave it alone,” Barrett said in an effort to boil the resolve’s intent down to its most basic level.

“Our position is leave it alone, stop meddling,” Tremble added.

While city officials acknowledged the Legislature can do whatever it wants, the resolve would at minimum put the city’s position on the record, City Solicitor Norman Heitmann said. It also would allow city staff to take actions consistent with that position.

Slot machines became legal here as the result of a 2003 statewide referendum.

As it stands, however, Bangor is the only municipality in the state that provided the needed local approval.

The Maine Gambling Control Board has been working for more than a year to develop and adopt rules and regulations governing virtually every aspect of the state’s fledgling gaming industry, from security and surveillance requirements to advertising and licensing rules for slots operators and vendors and for others that will be working in the industry.

While not a big fan of gambling, Council Chairman Frank Farrington has attended most of the gambling board’s meetings, usually held at the Maine Department of Public Safety’s Augusta headquarters.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Farrington said he had “a lot of confidence” in the people involved in regulating slots, and said the gambling control board was “even more of a watchdog” than he had expected.

Some of the bills that made their way through the legislative process during the most recent session aimed to limit the racino’s operating hours, cap losses for bettors, require hourly checks of gaming facility parking lots for children left unattended in vehicles and alter the revenue split established last year by members of the Legislature’s Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over gambling laws in Maine.

At that time, Penn National Gaming Inc. executive Steve Snyder saw some of the bills as an apparent attempt to scuttle the Bangor racino, which his company will operate.

“Having failed at the ballot box, the state’s anti-gaming interests seem to have reverted to a strategy of ‘death by a thousand cuts,'” he noted in written testimony submitted to the committee during a series of public hearings earlier this month.

The bills received little support, largely because most involved issues dealt with earlier, either by the gambling board or the Legislature. Most received “ought not to pass” recommendations from the legal and veterans panel, effectively killing them.