New Mexico has a stormy gaming past. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was signed by the House in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it looked like New Mexico would be one of the states to get on the Amerindian casino craze. Politics guaranteed that wouldn’t be the case.

The New Mexico governor Bruce King announced a working group in Nineteen Ninety to create an accord with New Mexico Native tribes. When the working group came to an accord with 2 important local tribes a year later, Governor King declined to sign the agreement. He held up a deal until Nineteen Ninety Four.

When a new governor took office in 1995, it seemed that American Indian gaming in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor passed the compact with the Native bands, anti-gaming forces were able to hold the contract up in courts. A New Mexico court ruled that Governor Johnson had overstepped his bounds in signing the accord, thereby denying the government of New Mexico many hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.

It took the CNA, signed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full contract between the Government of New Mexico and its Amerindian tribes. A decade had been squandered for gambling in New Mexico, including Native casino Bingo.

The non-profit Bingo business has grown since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico not for profit game owners acquired only $3,048 in revenues. That climbed to $725,150 in 2000, and passed a million dollars in 2001. Non-profit Bingo revenues have grown steadily since that time. 2005 saw the biggest year, with $1,233,289 grossed by the owners.

Bingo is apparently beloved in New Mexico. All sorts of providers look for a bit of the action. Hopefully, the politicians are through batting around gambling as an important matter like they did back in the 1990’s. That is most likely wishful thinking.