I support the right of charities to use gaming to give back and donate proceeds to noble causes. While there should, of course, be some level of regulatory oversight on these practices, I am adamantly opposed to burdening charities and interfering with their ability to operate and do the good they set out to do through excessive red tape and nonsensical and/or contradictory regulation. 

A number of the restrictions that these draft regulations would create go too far and make little sense. Some of the regulations in question are not consistent with Virginia code and some, to my mind, appear designed to prohibit charitable gaming altogether, which would be a great loss for our charities and for our Commonwealth as a whole. I would like to highlight here two proposed regulations that I find particularly egregious and would advise changing:

1. Ban on Concurrent Tournaments: This ban is one that troubles me and many of my colleagues and constituents. Large, for-profit casinos across the Commonwealth are currently allowed to host multiple games at once offering an array of competition and a variety of opportunities. If we allow for-profit casinos to operate multiple games at once, why would we deny non-profit, charitable organizations the same privilege? For many of these organizations, this is the best opportunity for meaningful fundraising that would better enable them to fulfill their missions and further their causes. To prohibit them from doing so does a disservice to them, the stakeholders that support them, and to the charitable cause itself. This ban infringes on the rights of individuals and significantly diminishes the ability of charities to operate successfully, while offering no real benefit to the citizens of our Commonwealth— who benefits from this? It seems to me to be a “solution” to a problem that does not exist. I strongly suggest that 11VAC20-30-90.F be struck from the final regulations.

2. Firewalls: I am also troubled by overly-restrictive firewall provisions such as 11VAC20-30-60.M. Here again we see restrictions on charitable gaming organizations that do not exist for for-profit casinos and gaming establishments. Why? While I can understand the benefit in requiring the disclosure of personnel overlap between landlord, operator, and charity, I see no benefit to denying these potentially useful relationships outright, especially when “conflict of interest” provisions already exist and are enforced by virtue of the 501(c) statuses these organizations must hold. Further, it is unclear to me that VDACS has the authority to dictate the nature of relationship between the poker operator, which is a for-profit company, and the landlord.