An attorney for a small North Florida race track Tuesday told the Florida Supreme Court that state lawmakers intentionally expanded the prospects for slot machines at pari-mutuel facilities outside Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
The Gretna Racing case argued before justices could have a broad impact on gambling in Florida — and could open the door for slot machines at Palm Beach Kennel Club, which has long sought the lucrative sidelight to its existing track and card rooms.
“They knew what they were writing when they did it,” Gretna Racing attorney Marc Dunbar said of lawmakers in 2009, when they created a law that allowed horse- and dog-tracks and jai-alai frontons to have slot machines, if approved by voters in their home counties.
Voters in six counties with pari-mutuels, including Palm Beach, approved slots in 2012. But state officials argue that the expansion can take place only after individual counties return to the Legislature for authorization to hold a referendum.
Jonathan Williams, a state deputy solicitor general representing Attorney General Pam Bondi, told justices that it made no sense for a gambling-wary Legislature to consider slot machines in counties outside Miami-Dade and Broward, where they’d been approved by a 2004 constitutional amendment.
Lawmakers were struggling to forge a compact with the Seminole Tribe, finalized in 2010, which included annual payments of more than $200 million to the state. In that agreement, the tribe was given exclusive rights to slot machines outside the two South Florida counties.
“This would’ve been a very serious expansion of Florida’s slot machine law,” Williams told justices.