Missouri Sports Betting Stalls Amid Legislative Gridlock

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00:00Meanwhile, sports betting in Missouri, still a battle between everybody and one person,

00:08essentially.

00:09I mean, there's just been this filibustering going on with the legislature.

00:13It seems like most people want this to happen, but there's one sticking block, and I don't

00:17know that anything will change with the same people in office.

00:20Yeah, so again, we had an adjournment on Friday.

00:26Missouri for a third straight year saw sports betting fall without anything happening, and

00:34that's because of a senator, Denny Hoskins.

00:37He's very adamant about including video lottery terminal legislation language, legalization

00:43language, in a sports betting bill, and that is not palatable to almost anybody else.

00:48Now, the previous two years, we've had a House bill cross over in the Senate, and we saw

00:53those long filibusters that you mentioned from a few senators that Hoskins is caucused

01:00with, and yeah, so this year, they didn't even send it over.

01:04It got to the House floor.

01:05They just didn't take a vote because they knew, because of Hoskins' comments, that it

01:11wasn't going to pass.

01:12Now, on the flip side, the parties that are pushing that, which is the professional sports

01:18teams for the most part, pushing the legislation, they knew last summer that it was not likely

01:24to pass this year, so they started the ballot petition effort.

01:28Well, earlier this month, they turned in the ballot petition with way more than enough

01:33signatures, assuming they're all valid, to be on the ballot in November, and so that'll

01:39give Missourians the actual opportunity to vote whether or not to legalize sports betting,

01:43so they're just going to do a little end around and try to just go over the legislator and

01:47legalize it that way, and interestingly, on Monday, the Winning for Missouri Education,

01:53the group behind this ballot push, turned in their recent 15-day-after-deadline report.

02:00FanDuel and DraftKings funneling a lot of money into this ballot effort as they turned

02:05to kind of focus on getting the vote out versus getting signatures.

02:09It's about $6.5 million thus far from the two companies, and I would not be totally

02:16surprised if we see some of the other companies now, as we're approaching the vote session,

02:23to start funneling some money in, too, to get the word out and advertising and things

02:27like that, so Missouri could be the next state to legalize if the public wants it.

02:33We'll see, but they didn't get it done legislatively, as again, they adjourned on Friday.