I've lost track of all that slots are supposed to do for Maryland - from keeping the sainted Preakness from high-tailing it out of Baltimore to boosting funding for schools to easing property taxes in the city to, oh yes, balancing the state budget.
Maybe slots were never going to be all that. It always seemed to me that the state was pinning a lot of its hopes on something that was literally a gamble.
But in recent months, it became even more obvious that the projected slots revenues, if they were ever realistic, are suddenly quite the fantasy. For one thing, the recession happened - and with it the lackluster response to the opening of bids to operate slot parlors here and the very real questions of how many machines would ultimately be approved and how many gamblers would actually be drawn to play them.
At Thursday's meeting of the Video Lottery Facility Location Commission in Annapolis, state officials acknowledged that Maryland won't go into fiscal 2010 with the full $90 million in licensing fees that it expected to receive from slots bidders. Two groups submitted bids without the required fees and were disqualified from further consideration. And it only gets worse from there - fewer slots means less revenue, so forget that $600 million a year that the 15,000 machines were supposed to add to state coffers once they were up and running.
So what now? The Laurel Park group has filed for an injunction against their bid being disqualified. Supporters of slots at Rocky Gap State Park in Western Maryland - the group that had bid on that site similarly did not submit licensing fees and was tossed out - said they hoped another bid would emerge. Since there's no currently viable bid for Rocky Gap, slots commission chairman Donald Fry said it could be opened for rebidding.
As it stands, the commission has four remaining bids to review - less than the state had hoped for, but, hey, that's what tends to happen when you roll the dice and gamble. While legitimate questions have risen over how Maryland structured the whole slots proposal - the state's 67 percent take of what operators collect from the machines is one of the highest in the nation, and surely dissuaded some companies from jumping in - it's hard to imagine how you could change the rules now that the game is already under way and four bidders have been playing by them.
Still, it's a whole 'nother game than anyone had anticipated even as recently as November.
