New Mexico has a rocky gaming past. When the IGRA was signed by the House in 1989, it looked like New Mexico might be one of the states to get on the Amerindian casino craze. Politics assured that would not be the situation.

The New Mexico governor Bruce King assembled a working group in Nineteen Ninety to negotiate a contract with New Mexico Native tribes. When the task force arrived at an agreement with 2 prominent local bands a year later, Governor King declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until 1994.

When a new governor took over in 1995, it appeared that Amerindian betting in New Mexico was now a certainty. But when the new Governor signed the contract with the Amerindian tribes, anti-gaming forces were able to tie the contract up in the courts. A New Mexico court found that the Governor had overstepped his bounds in signing the accord, thus denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.

It required the Compact Negotiation Act, signed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the ball rolling on a full compact between the Government of New Mexico and its Amerindian tribes. A decade had been burned for gambling in New Mexico, including American Indian casino Bingo.

The non-profit Bingo industry has grown from 1999. That year, New Mexico non-profit game providers brought in only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and surpassed one million dollars in revenues in 2001. Non-profit Bingo revenues have increased steadily since then. Two Thousand and Five witnessed the greatest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the operators.

Bingo is clearly favored in New Mexico. All sorts of owners try for a bit of the action. Hopefully, the politicians are done batting over gambling as an important factor like they did back in the 1990’s. That is without doubt hopeful thinking.