The casino industry has high hopes for the 2025 Texas legislative session in turning the state into the one of the last remaining strongholds without legalized gaming.
The session at G2E “Forecasting Texas Gaming Legislation: Predictions for 2025,” featured Andy Abboud, senior vice president of government relations with Las Vegas Sands, which has gone all in to secure gaming in the state with its lobbying efforts. The panel also included Rick Limardo, senior vice president of government affairs at MGM Resorts International and Cesar Fernandez, head of U.S. state government relations with FanDuel.
Panel moderator David Rittvo, a principal with Tailored Hospitality Advisors, said Texas could be the largest gaming market in the U.S. for both online and land-based operations that’s currently not in play.
For years, Texas has wrestled with legalizing gaming to keep people from going to Louisiana and Oklahoma to gamble instead. A lack of will by lawmakers and moral opposition have helped keep gambling out.
Unlike some other states, Texas has a big enough budget surplus that lawmakers aren’t as concerned about raising revenue as elsewhere, the panel said.
“A lot of progress was made in the 2021 and 2023 sessions, thanks to people on the stage and others in the crowd, and that momentum will try and come forward in 2025,” Rittvo said.
Governor Greg Abbott hasn’t come out in support, but is open to the idea of gaming. The likely speaker of the House in 2025, Dade Phelan, is pro-gaming and is open to holding a vote that would place a gaming measure on the ballot like it did with horse racing. The Texas Senate, led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has opposed expanding gambling in Texas. The Senate in 2023 rejected a bill to approve online sports betting after the House passed it.
An April poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation showed that 47% of likely voters backed legalizing online sports betting and 37% were against it. Some 56% favored resort-casinos, while 30% were opposed.
Two-thirds of the House and Senate need to pass legislation, along with enabling legislation to set up the framework and a statewide referendum.
“No matter what happens over the next six months when the legislative session opens in January, a lot of work needs to be done post-haste to make this all happen,” Rittvo said. “The framework, depending on if it’s brick and mortar or online gaming, allows for multiple casinos in some of the large populated areas, with some smaller casinos in the southern part of the state and elsewhere. From the online sports betting perspective, the previous frameworks have allowed partnerships with sports teams across the state. All of that is potentially in play for 2025.”
Abboud said 2025 should be another legislative session of “great progress” and that “it’s amazing how far it’s come in the last three years.” The overriding understanding that people need to have is the expansion of land-based casinos in Texas “is inevitable. We’re constantly in the field polling the voters and we have an active grassroots campaign monitoring support. We overwhelmingly have voter support. It went from not getting a hearing before to a hearing process and almost passing the House and on the verge of passing the Senate.”
Patrick said when proponents have the vote to pass casino legislation in the Senate, he’ll call a vote, so it’s important to focus on those finite number of members to get it done, Abboud said.
Despite “whatever political winds there may be in the legislature,” Abboud said the more the members of the Senate hear from their constituents about how much they want gaming to happen in Texas and their right to vote on it, the more likely it is to happen. “But it is inevitable. There’s too much support in the community from school teachers and firefighters that doesn’t have a lot to do with the lobbyists in Austin, but it has to do with what’s going on in communities across the state of Texas. We see it on a regular basis. They see that money leaving the state and would like it to return. They see they have robust economies at the state level, but not so much at the municipal level. You’ll never go to a school district or municipality or county government that says we’re flush with cash. They’re the greatest beneficiaries of the expansion of casino gaming with destination resorts and eventually becoming the biggest advocates for it at the grassroots level.”
Abboud said Las Vegas Sands is there for the long haul to get it across the finish line and that money will be spent on a ballot measure opposing gaming, but proponents will spend much more.
“There’s a great opportunity for the legalization of gaming to happen and put the constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2025,” said Abboud, though he admitted it could also be a later date. “It has incredibly strong appeal in the 60 percentile and 80% of Texans want the right to vote on it that goes across every demographic and every religion, including Baptists. It goes across political persuasions and across every geographic area of the state.”
Limardo told the audience that politicians in the state are going through difficult elections this year, so ramifications have to be worked through the 2025 legislature. There will be more than 30 new members in the House and two new members in the Senate and Speaker of the House Phelan is fighting to remain in office.
“A caucus will be working through those challenges. They have their own issues with vouchers, the electric grid, and other policy issues they need to deal with,” Limardo said of lawmakers. “About sports betting and casinos, it’s about stacking progress that we made last year – about hearings and getting a vote. The sports betting bill had a supermajority – the first passed out of a Texas body from at least once chamber since the early 1990s. That’s huge progress. On the casino side, it was close to the supermajority (in the House), so we made a lot of good progress on both. It’s about continuing to stack up wins and moving the ball forward. We know what we have to do. We have to show that it’s viable in the Senate and get the votes there. We have to educate the new members in the House and build on our support in the Senate, but like Andy said, it’s inevitable. We showed the strong votes we had in the House last year. If people had seen a pathway in the Senate, I think you would have seen those numbers go higher in the House.”
The success in Texas will be by going district to district, Fernandez said, showing legislators that legal sports betting in Texas would generate about $250 million in tax revenue a year.
“We have to make the case that those funds go to solve key problems the legislature is tackling, property-tax reduction or teachers,” Fernandez said. “If you look at the first five years, more than $1 billion in tax revenue would be generated from sports betting. That would fund about 20,000 teacher salaries. You have to frame it in this way, because despite the popularity and despite this being about sports fans and entertainment, it’s a partnership with the state that will do a lot of good.”
Fernandez said they also need to make the point to lawmakers that $7 billion is wagered on sports illegally in Texas every year. In September, one million people tried to open the app of a regulated sports book outside the state.
“This isn’t a question of whether we want to allow sports betting or not. It’s whether we want to put consumer protections in place, capture tax revenue, and lead into responsible gaming that offshore books are not,” Fernandez said.
Abboud said while it’s potentially one of the largest gaming markets in the county, it’s probably the largest illegal gaming market right now. There are illegal slot parlors and illegal online gaming throughout the state and lawmakers don’t have any idea and need to be educated on that.
