After starting an hour late and enduring 6½ hours of debate and several noisy outbursts, the DC City Council passed its FY 2026 budget at 7:28 p.m. local time Monday. In doing so, the council all but extinguished a gambling lawsuit that could have cost commercial sports betting operators tens of millions of dollars. Mayor Muriel Bowser must now sign the budget, but she has initiated the changes to the city’s loss-recovery act that are part of the approved budget.
In the course of a meeting that involved heated debate about tipped minimum wage and raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for programs in poorer neighborhoods, an amendment to the Statute of Anne text did not rate discussion. Bowser included language in her Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal to exempt sports betting, blackjack and poker, lottery games, and some charitable gaming from the more-than-300-year-old law.
