Eighty-six percent of Louisiana’s parishes voted on Nov. 3 to allow sports betting within their borders, leading critics of legalized gambling to warn of over-promised revenue benefits and a rise in youth gaming addiction.
Ryan Berni, a spokesman for Louisiana Wins, the group that spearheaded the sports betting ballot measures, said in a Twitter post that sports betting won 65 percent of the vote statewide.
“Wins in 55 of 64 parishes representing over 95 percent of the population will mean more money for Louisiana’s many needs." Berni said. Now on to legislature for rulemaking.”
The parish votes come in the wake of the passage of Senate Bill 130, which laid out a process to allow parishes to hold elections on sports betting. It’s now expected to take more than a year for the state to pass legislation to establish rules and a tax framework that will provide a revenue stream to state and local governments.
But critics of expanding legalized gambling in Louisiana contend that the revenue benefits of sports betting are overstated and that expanded gaming raises the risk of younger people becoming addicted to gambling.
“Sports betting has been marketed as simply a form of harmless entertainment,” Gene Mills, president of the Louisiana Family Forum, told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Unfortunately, it is not. Gamblers in parishes which do not have brick-and-mortar casinos will arguably be able to gamble 24/7 online! It will be the responsibility of the Louisiana legislature to protect citizens, especially children, from the pervasive and addictive nature of online gambling.”
Large, out-of-state interests helped to bankroll the effort to approve sports betting in Louisiana, according to Mills, and the backers of sports wagering predicted the state would reap significant additional tax revenues once the betting infrastructure is in place.
“This campaign projected that the state would receive hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue from sports betting,” he said. “The state’s fiscal office has concluded that the possible revenue is largely unknown and that it is more likely closer to a few million dollars.”
The Family Forum is also concerned that a youth culture captivated by video games will become vulnerable to addiction to sports gaming.
“No demographic is more alluring for internet gambling operators than America’s youth, including those in Louisiana,” Mills said. “It’s well-established that the younger a child is introduced to gambling, the greater the propensity that they will become habitual users.”
So it’s necessary for the state to provide some kind of mechanism to prevent underage gambling online – one that is resistant to hackers, he said, adding that the prevention and treatment of gambling addiction need to be high priorities.
“If Louisiana’s state government encourages online gambling, it sets up an entire generation to become problem gamers by making exploitative forms of gambling omnipresent in everyday life, in their own homes, schools and even faith communities,” Mills said.