Roderick Wright recently withdrew a bill that would have made it easier to legalize poker in California. It has become known that he was prompted by certain interested people.
In the past, promising to contribute to the legalization of online poker, Wright was able to enlist the support of casinos and Indians, especially the Morongo tribe. The decisive factor in making the decision was their ability to rehabilitate the unhealthy state economy, gaining an extra $2.4 billion from online gaming legalization and another $6.1 billion in the next decade.
Initially, the gaming establishments planned to open several online poker resources with Morongo, but were prevented from doing so by officials who announced their decision to license several American and foreign companies, as mentioned by Candy Adams from Nodepositz blog.
It is interesting that casinos and Indians contributed to the failure of a bill that was not even in the Senate. They asked the authorities to leave the management of the business in their hands in order to save jobs, and to allow card clubs to continue to prosper, making the state profitable.
In a letter to the Senate, representatives of Morongo and gambling establishments wrote that licensing foreign operators and businessmen from Las Vegas would not save the state’s economy, but would only increase the flow of finance into the wrong hands. However, Lloyd Levine, a former California lawmaker, said that he believed the position of the tribe and the casino was based on a greedy desire to earn more money, rather than on a patriotic idea.
Probably, Morongo, card clubs and authorities of «golden state» will once again sit at the table of negotiations, before all contradictions are settled and compromise in difficult issue of legalization of online poker is found. How long this will take is unknown. In the meantime, Mark Macarro, the head of the Pechanga Indian Group, has promised that if online gambling is legalized in California, he will stop paying the annual casino tax of $42 million starting next year.