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INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION ROUNDTABLE: GAMING CONFERENCES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19

2021; Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1089/glr2.2020.29008.rtl

2572-5327

Sue Schneider, Ernie Stevens, Marc Ellinger, Bill Miller, Bill Coley,

Gambling Behavior and Treatments

Gaming Law ReviewVol. 25, No. 1 InterviewFree AccessINDUSTRY ASSOCIATION ROUNDTABLE: GAMING CONFERENCES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19Moderator: Sue Schneider, Participants: Ernie Stevens JR., Marc Ellinger, Bill Miller, and Bill ColeyModerator: Sue SchneiderSue Schneider is vice president of growth and strategy, Americas, at Sports Betting Community in Saint Charles, Missouri.Search for more papers by this author, Participants: Ernie Stevens JR.Ernie Stevens Jr. is chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association in Oneida, Wisconsin.Search for more papers by this author, Marc EllingerMarc Ellinger is president of the International Masters of Gaming Law in Jefferson City, Missouri.Search for more papers by this author, Bill MillerBill Miller is CEO of the American Gaming Association in Washington, DC.Search for more papers by this author, and Bill ColeyBill Coley is a state senator in the Ohio Senate and president of the National Council of Legislators for Gaming States in Butler County, Ohio.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:12 Feb 2021https://doi.org/10.1089/glr2.2020.29008.rtlAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookXLinked InRedditEmail SUE SCHNEIDER: I am really pleased to have you all assembled. I have a long personal history working with a lot of the gaming associations, and I am always curious to see how things are going. I know this has been a tough year for all associations.ERNIE STEVENS JR.: I am chairman and chief spokesperson of the Indian gaming industry, and I am Oneida—that is the name of our tribe—member of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, originally from New York State. In the early 1800s, we migrated out this way for a lot of reasons. I will not give you a history lesson today unless you ask me.But we are here. We have been here since the early 1800s. We bought this land from the Menominee Tribe here, and we share this state with Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee, Ho-Chunk, Ojibwes, Potawatomis. There are lots of good, hard-working casinos in our state.I am excited to be on the call with you guys today, and ready to pick your brain about any thoughts and ideas that we are doing to continue to work towards the new normal and get our world back on our feet again and find a safe place in that new normal. Thanks for having me on today.MARC ELLINGER: I am Marc Ellinger. I am in private practice in Jefferson City, Missouri, and St. Louis, Missouri. I predominantly practice in gaming law in Missouri, but also consulting, advising folks all over the U.S. and outside of the U.S.I also serve, and I think this is most relevant, as the president of the International Masters of Gaming Law [IMGL], which is an international organization predominantly made up of gaming attorneys in private practice, although we do have some members that are attorneys in the industry directly. And we have affiliate members that serve in various roles in industry.We are committed to education. That is our primary goal as an entity. We work very hard to make sure that we get cutting-edge ideas out there on how to make the gaming industry better from a regulatory perspective. Obviously, not so much from a business, pure dollar-and-sense perspective, but from legislation, regulation, and compliance perspectives, to make sure that the industry runs smoothly, efficiently, and continues its growth path.Obviously, the pandemic changes have been shocking for everybody, not least the gaming industry itself, and I know we are going to talk about that more. I am really pleased to be here with you.BILL MILLER: Thank you for having me on with such an esteemed group of people. Mr. Chairman, always good to see you, sir, Senator, Marc. The American Gaming Association [AGA] represents commercial and tribal operators, suppliers, and manufacturers spanning domestic, international, and regional, from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. And so, it is a broad organization.I have been lucky enough to have had the job of CEO for just about 20 months. The first year was a reasonably easy and exciting one, with the expansion of sports betting across the country after the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 on PASPA [Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act]. I had an opportunity to visit with the senator in San Diego in January. I feel like those were some of the last weeks of normalcy.I will never forget the trip. Chairman Stevens talks about how he has been out to Washington once since the pandemic. I have made a couple trips myself since the pandemic. One was out to Nebraska, which was easy. No drama around that.But I was in Las Vegas about two weeks ago, and it was clear what the shutdown has meant for the organization. I was in Chicago on March 12th, and I was out meeting with the CEO of Rush Street Gaming, Greg Carlin. I remember leaving lunch with Greg and walked out, and his assistant said, "Hey, Greg, the NCAA has just canceled March Madness. Oh, and Greg, another thing. MLB has just decided that they are going to postpone all of spring training."I think I can characterize my 20 months at the AGA in dog years. It has been a short tenure, but a lot of experience.SEN. BILL COLEY: I am State Senator Bill Coley. I live just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, in beautiful Butler County. But I have had the privilege of getting to know these other gentlemen in my duties as chairman of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee. My committee tends to handle almost all the gaming issues, and so in my duties over the last eight or nine years, I have gotten to get knee deep in all things gaming and regulation.We are a unique state in the sense that we have four different regulatory agencies—the lottery, which handles traditional lottery stuff as well as the seven racinos. And then our Casino Control Commission handles the casinos and the skill games. Our Racing Commission handles our pari-mutuel racing, and then our attorney general handles our charitable gaming.It is a hodgepodge of regulation, and it is problematic. But it also lets me see a lot of things up close as far as where the problems in the industry lie.The important thing we are looking at is how do we move forward. We have learned a lot of lessons through this shutdown, and that is the importance of electronic methods of communication, and electronic gaming, and how can we make that work for each individual region of the country and each venue? So, I am glad to be on this panel with such esteemed colleagues here.SUE SCHNEIDER: Senator, could you tell us about the impact that this has had on the NCLGS [National Council of Legislators from Gaming States] Association? I am curious because each of you are in a little different area in terms of who your constituents are. So, I think we are going to have a pretty broad range of experience to talk about here.I also know—and we will get into some of the impacts—that many of you are reliant on your various events for your budgets. In general, what impact have you seen on NCLGS itself so far?SEN. BILL COLEY: Well, it has been pretty devastating to us, because the important thing that we do at NCLGS is share information so that we get the best regulations and the best laws for each state. But this has been devastating to us, because we operate based on our two meetings a year, our winter meeting and our summer meeting. That is where our revenue is derived from. Obviously, we cannot get together, and that is problematic.We have been doing a number of teleconferences, and those are positive. I have been such a passionate advocate of NCLGS because when we started up in Ohio, we did not know. There's the old adage, what you do not know, you do not know. We did not know anything about gaming. The way I educated myself was to set up a meeting with the FBI. They were the only ones in the state that knew anything about the problems associated with gaming.Bill's group, AGA, does a great job. It has a little different industries perspective than NCLGS, which is more neutral. Bill's group does a great job advocating a little bit more for industry, but not overly. They keep a pretty level hand at things.And then the importance of making sure that your lotteries and your pari-mutuels are taken care of, and your tribal gaming is just so vital that, as Chairman Stevens has educated me on numerous occasions, making sure that you understand the importance of those revenues to not only all the people that benefit from within the tribe, but all the employees and all the good works that the tribe does with those revenues, it is just vital. So this whole thing has just been really, really tough on everyone.SUE SCHNEIDER: Bill, can you talk a little bit about the AGA? What is the impact of the AGA having to postpone G2E [Global Gaming Expo] for this year?BILL MILLER: I do not mean to make light of it, but every industry, with the exception of FedEx, UPS, and Amazon, has suffered devastating impacts from the coronavirus, everything from education to health care to the travel, tourism sector that we inhabit.Unquestionably, from the perspective of our members, and really the gaming industry writ large, all 989 of the country's casinos were closed—many in excess of three months. Those closures were mandated by the government for appropriate reasons. We are beginning to see that open back up again.It is slow, though. It is slow. We just saw August numbers come in over the last couple of days, and we have seen things get better. But for me, before I came to the AGA, I knew the trade association world pretty well, and I knew how to work hard and advocate on behalf of an industry or, in the cases of my two previous jobs, industries across the business waterfront at both the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.But in this job, I do have two giant trade associations, true trade shows—G2E in Las Vegas and G2E Asia in Macao. And so both of those, we had to make very difficult decisions in terms of understanding what the stakeholders wanted to see, both stakeholders being the supplier/manufacturers who exhibit, and then the customers, the tribal and commercial operators, that come to see what is the latest and greatest in the industry.We had G2E Asia scheduled for this past May in Macao, and we had to postpone it a couple times before finally canceling it. We had to go through the same kind of process with G2E Las Vegas that we had scheduled for October, and ultimately decided to move virtual for 2020.And what a trade show means for an organization like ourselves is significant revenue to the trade association so that we can better advocate on behalf of the industry at the federal level.The impact has been significant. I think it is going to take a while for the industry to bring itself back to where we were pre-pandemic. Whether you looked at the commercial space, the tribal space, the suppliers, lotteries, et cetera, we had never enjoyed greater popularity among the American population. We had never seen our economic impact stronger. In essence, there were almost two million jobs either directly or indirectly supported by the industry. It was spinning off tremendous amounts of tax revenue and positive community impact in all those states, communities, and tribal nations in which we operate. So it is a very difficult time. We are beginning to climb out of the rubble, but it is going to take a long time.SUE SCHNEIDER: Marc, do you want to talk a little bit about IMGL?MARC ELLINGER: I would be happy to. So Bill really talked a lot about how the virus has affected the U.S. gaming market, and it has been devastating. We are predominantly a land-based market. Unlike other countries, we have very limited online and mobile gaming in this country. As a result, the impacts have been really devastating for land-based casinos.There has been a uniquely global impact, unlike anything else that has ever occurred in any industry in my lifetime. I have been practicing gaming law for more than 20 years and the pandemic has shut down all the casinos across the globe, and not just ones in the United States.Maybe in the past, due to a hurricane, you might see one state get impacted. Due to some type of violence, such as a war, you may see a country impacted. Never has there been something as global as this.As an organization that represents gaming lawyers across the entire globe, it has been a unique experience, because everybody is suffering through the same impact.The difference I note from a practice perspective is that countries that adopted early online and mobile gaming have continued to move forward in a fairly dramatic fashion. If you talk to our members across the globe that are actively involved in online gaming and mobile gaming, their practices are busy, their clients are busy, because everybody has learned how to adapt and do everything online, from your living room, or from wherever you are at in the moment.That has been a benefit to some of these companies and jurisdictions that have been early adopters. In the U.S., the gaming market has suffered more to a certain extent because we were not early adopters of online gaming.As an organization, we focus so hard on education. Our annual conferences—we do two, one in the spring and one in the fall—are our opportunities to share information, to network and talk about the ongoing trends, the cutting-edge issues, the dangers that are out there. So much of that is lost by virtue of having to cancel our conference in Athens in March.Bill said he has been CEO for 20 months. I have been president for ten months. Basically my first job as president after hosting a reception at ICE in London was to come back and cancel a conference in Athens. We had a joint conference with the International Association of Gaming Regulators in September in Boston that we ultimately had to postpone to next year.We have tried to adapt by doing online and virtual master classes. We have always focused on education; we've done IMGL Masterclasses at NCLGS over the years and at a number of various other conferences, where we put together a panel of lawyers to talk about regulatory issues. That lets us share information, but also learn information. That has all disappeared, because the conversations that occur outside of the panels and presentations have been so important, not just for our organization, but for all organizations.We are going to do a full-blown virtual conference in November, the 10th through the 12th, where we are going to spend one day talking about the Americas, one day talking about Australasia, and one day talking about Europe tied to those time zones so that it is most convenient for our members and attendees in those geographic areas.But we are all learning this on the fly. It is going to create long-term changes. I do not know that there is ever going to be the normal that we had a year ago. We are all going to adapt from it, and those who would get out in front now and look at how this is going to have a long-term impact are going to have the best opportunities in the future.As an organization, we are working very hard to do that. We cannot wait to get back to in-person meetings, but in the interim, we try to make the experience as close to in-person as we can.SUE SCHNEIDER: And Ernie, NIGA [National Indian Gaming Association], how are things progressing at NIGA?ERNIE STEVENS JR.: We have made some progress in that we just had a membership meeting virtually. It was the first time we have ever done that. We also have had a leadership summit in the summertime on the webinar.You know, these things are helping us to keep up a dialogue with the leadership and are helping us to stay in touch. We have been able to do our regulator training, our commissioner training, our different kinds of trainings whether it is by webinar or Zoom. We have done this right from the start.I am on another one tomorrow. We keep working with our friends out there, our sister organizations and sister or regional associations and try and do our best to utilize this. I know we are working to a new normal, but I do not want this to be the new normal. I want to be able to sit down across from you guys and say hello. I want to be able to have our constituency share our resources and share our thoughts and ideas.But for now, this technology is the only way that we can find a new normal and work our way to a safer environment. It is really going to take all of us. And so I am really excited to sit here with the powers that be, so to speak, because the constituency that we hold are the ones that are going to help us find out and build that new normal. We are not going to go back to the way it was.But the only way we are going to get back to being able to have employees, have safe work environments and different things like that, is to work together.Statistic-wise, we were top in the industry in gaming, Indian country, and now I am not sure where we are. They estimated our industry could be down easily 20 percent. Going into this, I think we were the 11th-highest employer in the country, behind Walmart and Amazon and all these guys. Now we are not sure where we are.For me, I think that what we have talked about overall with all the tribes and, again, with the regulators and the frontline employees, the managers, different folks like that, is really about safety and being strong and being healthy and moving forward in a manner that is safe for us.That has to be of vital importance, for us to be able to do this. We have to be safe, and we have to be careful. And in order to do that, we have got to work together. Prior to this, we talked about jobs. We had 300,000 jobs or so, in our industry, and that number nearly doubled when we talk about the offshoot, the businesses which clearly are impacted by this pandemic. So, we have really got to get together and try to figure this out.The good thing is, we have got qualified people. We have got knowledge people, and we have this working agreement and we understand each other. That is key, locking arms and going forward.I was just over in Michigan, believe it or not, for a golf tournament. The golf tournament was a fundraiser—they called it the Heroes Cup. They recognized and raised money for first responders and folks that are on the front line.When we announced this a year ago at Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, we had no idea that this is what we were going to be in this time. In my community here, in Oneida, Wisconsin, if I need a policeman, he is here in a couple minutes. If there is a fire, if I need an ambulance.These folks, these are the ones we really recognize through this. When we started opening up our gaming operations, we had put all the safety standards in place. Again, we have had some ups and downs, but for the most part, we are doing well. But when we have a breakout or situations like that, we have got to close up shop.It is devastating because many of the people that got laid off because of the pandemic are still not back to work. We have nowhere near the number of staff that we had going into it. When you really think about it, we really thank those frontline heroes, those frontline employees, and the managers and regulators. I do not think regulators ever went home, either.The key is for us to lock arms and work on this together. That is why at NIGA we continue to try to have these webinars and Zoom calls so that we can all understand where we are and where we are going. And if we do that, then we are going to make it through this thing as fast as possible to get to that new normal. I think slowly but surely, we are getting there.In this industry, we have folks that have gone to college and folks that have 30 years of experience. We have to put our minds together and empower those people that we work for and with.That really would be my message today. We really have to empower our team, our family, and the folks around us.And in our industry, of the 300,000 employees we had before, about half are non-tribal members. We are all in this together. I always say that you may not be a member of my tribe, but you are part of our Indian gaming family. It is really important that we show appreciation.The real downside, the struggle is—and we have all had this happen in our industries—we have got people who are cleaning out their offices and their desks that got laid off with the thinking that in a couple weeks it would all be good again. We do not have the resources in our respective industries to get these folks back to work. And so these people, after 10 or 20 years on the job, are cleaning out their offices and cleaning their desks out.That is the real sad part, because these people are giving their life to the industry. So, we have really got to figure out how we can get those folks back to work again and back on their feet. And that is this entire world.SUE SCHNEIDER: You bring up a good point in terms of safety, because once we all get to the point where we are trying to do live events again, people have to have a comfort level. Once we do that, our events are probably going to look very different—in the short term, anyway—than they have in the past. It will be interesting to see how it sorts out.What, from the association standpoint, has been the biggest challenge so far in 2020?MARC ELLINGER: The biggest challenge from an association perspective is losing the ability to have the face-to-face meetings, and then having to adapt on the fly as quickly as possible. For us it has not been such a revenue impact as it is an educational and a sharing of ideas impact. We rely on the ability to talk to folks in groups on a constant basis, both to share our educational concepts and to share developments we see, but also to learn from other folks about developments and new ideas. There is nothing that has been done yet, at least that I can find from the virtual perspective, that gives you that same opportunity.And as a result, I think there are lots of people that are very busy, but the ideas and the sharing that comes in the face-to-face meetings has disappeared. That is a terrible loss to this industry. It is going to be tough to get back.At some point, one of us or some other entity of our type is going to have to have the first in-person event, and we are all going to learn on the fly how that works. If we have a cocktail party, are we going to have 400 people like we did two years ago, or are we going to have 40 people because nobody wants to show up?If you only have 40 people, not only do you have a financial loss out of it, but you lose that chance to interact and that ability to talk. It is going to take years to figure out how much it is going to affect us.BILL MILLER: With every casino operation shut down in America, my principal job—and I am working very closely with Chairman Stevens—was to make sure that this industry was treated the same as every other industry in America as it related to relief.The CARES Act, which was really a three-stage set of relief packages at the federal level, allowed for support for this industry as well as other industries that had been hurt so much by the pandemic.And while it seems like no big deal that we should have been included in that, as we were hurt in the same way as every other industry—the reality is, going back to 9/11, to Katrina, to Superstorm Sandy, to the Great Recession of 2008–2009, in every one of those relief packages, the gaming industry was specifically discriminated against and carved out from relief.For the first time ever in the history of the industry, we actually were included and treated the same way as everybody else, because people recognize that when you support 1.8 million jobs around the country and have huge economic impact in these communities, you cannot sit around in Congress and watch this industry wither away because of outdated views on the industry.The greatest challenge was making sure that we corrected those members of Congress of the old stereotypes and made them recognize and understand, in the same way that the senator does and legislators across the country, that we are great community partners. We provide great jobs, careers, and, importantly, revenue to the governments in the places where we are, and all of that would be put at risk if the gaming industry were carved out of any federal relief.And so it was definitely the greatest challenge, but I would say that working together, and very differently than the way the AGA might have operated in the past, which was, "Hey, call Harry Reid. We have the Senate Leader who is one of the most powerful politicians in Congress who represents the State of Nevada. He will protect the industry."Now, because we have this large tribal and commercial gaming footprint in 43 states, we did not have to convince people in Ohio like Rob Portman, or Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, or Steve Daines in Montana, that relief had to come at the federal level.That challenge was by far the biggest hurdle to overcome, but we overcame it in a historic fashion, and I do not think we are ever going back. I do not think we are ever going to go back to a place where gaming is discriminated against because of outdated stereotypes.SUE SCHNEIDER: It sounds like you took that challenge and turned it into an upside with building that infrastructure of constituents. So that is good to hear.SEN. BILL COLEY: Bill, you make a good point. It is nice to have a president who understands that gross gaming revenue is not the same as profit. I have spoken to legislators around the world at these various conferences that we have all participated in. I think there is one universal that legislators around the world agree on. They would rather get diphtheria than do gaming law. They hate it.And I get it. You do not make a lot of friends passing laws in the gaming area because the anti-gaming people are mad at you and think "Oh, you are pro-gaming," and the pro-gaming people are mad at you because you did not go far enough. It is a tough area to pass laws in.But if there is one thing we learned from this whole shutdown it is the importance of gaming revenues and impact—as Bill pointed out and Ernie pointed out—that those have in those communities are huge. I got to meet a lot of people with the Pechanga Tribe when we were out in Temecula in January, and that facility has changed lives, not only for the members of the tribe, but for other people that just started out. They started out in the hospitality industry that is entertainment and gaming, and they were the first ones to get jobs there, and their kids are now, as Ernie knows, their kids are now in college, and they are standing on the shoulders of their parents and building futures for themselves.And that does not happen if you do not have an industry that is supported in the statehouse and in Congress. We have to adapt, and we have to make some changes to our laws that facilitate entertainment and gaming in a global environment that may be dealing with these type of pandemics for years to come.We cannot—this cannot be the new normal, where everybody sits at home, because there is just too much energy, too many good things that happen when people get together, synergy occurs. We try to do what we can electronically, like we are doing right now, but it is just not the same energy. It is not the same thing. And I just do not want our people to lose the benefits of people getting together.SUE SCHNEIDER: Do you think, Senator, that that has been one of the bigger challenges for NCLGS, or are there other issues that have arisen?SEN. BILL COLEY: Absolutely, it is a big challenge. We have talked about those kinds of problems. This is what is really good as we move forward. We have people that still think that you have got to go inside the convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. And we talk about, "Oh, well, maybe we can modernize." They could buy a car with their cell phone. They can order dinner with their cell phone. They can buy virtually anything in the store through Amazon. Instead of going to the store, they can buy with their cell phone. They ought to be able to buy a lottery ticket that way, and, you know, modernizing those kind of things is challenging.And yet, some people push, "Oh, no, that will ruin this industry or that industry." And as this shutdown has transpired, we have learned a lot of that is not true. We are seeing some synergies exist where states have opened up. States that have had electronic versions of entertainment have seen business at their in-person venues increase, at the same time usage of their online versions of the entertainment increase.So it is something that is a real positive that we want to see grow, and we have to educate legislators around the country on the importance of that. And that is why I like working with Bill, Marc, and Ernie on educating those people and making sure they know what their options are, and they can decide what is best for their community.SUE SCHNEIDER: What are NIGA's challenges?ERNIE STEVENS JR.: It is really important that folks understand, if we can work together, everybody can work together to building a new normal. I think we had our bumps in the road. I talked to Bill more than once about some of the technicalities and some of the stimulus money and different things like that, and we had to go to work and get people to understand that our industry is very valuable and that going forward we still have some work to do.But our industry needs to be a part of the stimulus, needs to have congressional help to get us to where we need to go. And once they understand that, and once we can put hundreds, if not thousands, of people back to work, they are going to really appreciate what we do and where we come from.It is really, really vital that we work together, and we have demonstrated that through this