Mass. Senate tees up sports betting bill
‘Committee has come to agreement on a strong proposal’
The state Senate is poised to debate legislation to legalize sports betting, but the bill that emerged Friday afternoon from a Senate committee differs in several important ways from the sports betting bill that has already cleared the House.
The vote could come Thursday.
The long-awaited wagering bill was advanced favorably out of the Senate Ways and Means Committee late Friday afternoon, according to a Senate source.
If it passes the Senate next week, lawmakers would have about three months to reconcile their differing approaches and get a bill to Gov. Charlie Baker, who has supported legalizing sports wagering for years.
“I am pleased to see the committee has come to agreement on a strong proposal and I look forward to discussing it with my colleagues next week,” Senate President Karen Spilka, who for months resisted calls to debate sports betting while citing a desire to first solidify consensus among senators, said Friday.
The House passed a sports betting bill 156-3 last summer and approved sports betting legalization as part of an economic development bill the year before, but the Senate has been far less interested in tackling the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 gave states the ability to legalize sports wagering.
More than 30 states — including neighboring Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New York — have taken action to allow betting on sports contests since May 2018.
There appear to be a number of significant differences between the bill the Senate Ways and Means Committee advanced Friday and the legislation that easily passed the House in July, most notably the Senate bill’s prohibition on wagers on collegiate athletics.
Even before the House took its vote, House Speaker Ronald Mariano drew a line in the sand on Bloomberg Baystate Business and declared that leaving collegiate betting out of any bill “probably would be” a dealbreaker for him.
“I find myself having a tough time trying to justify going through all of this to not include probably the main driver of betting in the Commonwealth,” Mariano said last summer.
The Senate’s approach of banning betting on college sports is in line with a request from the presidents and athletic directors of the eight Massachusetts colleges and universities that have Division I sports programs.
Officials from Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, The College of the Holy Cross, Merrimack College and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst and Lowell) in 2020 urged lawmakers to leave college betting out of any legalization bill.
Legal betting on college athletics, the presidents and athletic directors said, will lead to “unnecessary and unacceptable risks to student athletes, their campus peers, and the integrity and culture of colleges and universities in the Commonwealth.”
If the House bill were to become law, the chamber’s leadership estimated it could produce about $60 million in annual revenue for the state.
But Mariano said the revenue estimate would drop to between $25 million and $35 million annually without college betting.
The Senate Ways and Means Committee estimated that its version of the sports betting legislation would produce $35 million in annual revenue for the state.