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SportsTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:03 >> Is Missouri gonna get their act together with sports betting, Sam?
00:05 I mean, I thought over the last year, we'd be breaking some news talking about how
00:10 they've legalized sports betting.
00:11 And it certainly feels like there was at least a 50/50 shot that this was going to
00:16 happen, but they've fallen behind the possibility for
00:18 some other states having it legalized.
00:20 What's the latest there?
00:21 >> Yeah, Missouri's been late to the game pretty much for one reason.
00:27 There's this one lawmaker, a senator named Danny Hoskins in Missouri,
00:32 who has vowed to stop every effort to legalize sports betting unless he gets
00:37 his way on legalizing video lottery terminals, which are pretty much just
00:42 kind of digital, what they sound like, digital slot machines and things of that
00:46 nature, which exist in the state, but kind of under a gray area of law where they're
00:50 not really legal and there's no enforcement against them.
00:53 The main problem there is the casinos really don't want that to happen.
00:57 They kind of see it as something that could steal from their business.
01:00 So essentially, the casinos are all for sports betting, but
01:03 they're not for video lottery terminal legalization.
01:06 And Hoskins has been in the middle of that roadblock saying, hey,
01:10 if I don't get my way, I'm just gonna filibuster every bill.
01:14 And that's what he's done for the past two years, past three years.
01:17 Watching it happen has been astonishing,
01:21 just spending hours to kill this bill, which you can do in law.
01:25 It's kind of a crazy reality of it that this one guy is holding the whole thing up.
01:29 But now you have some more pressure, a renewed effort in Missouri.
01:33 There is some legislation that's swirling that faces maybe the same fate with
01:39 Hoskins, but there's another option out there which should give some Missourians
01:43 hope that wants sports betting.
01:45 It's this ballot initiative which just got approved to gather signatures by
01:49 the Secretary of State, which could legalize sports betting on its own,
01:52 essentially bypassing the legislature, giving the power to the people to figure
01:57 it out, so that could put added pressures on lawmakers to figure it out and
02:00 get their bill in before this other bill comes here.
02:03 But they need about 170,000 signatures by May 5th in order to get on the ballot.
02:10 We've seen states like California be successful getting it on the ballot.
02:13 What happens after that isn't always great.
02:16 Florida has tried this before.
02:18 They failed to get the signatures.
02:20 Most other states where this has happened, they get the signatures.
02:23 But so far what they're telling legal sports support and
02:26 my colleagues at legal sports support is they wanna see kind of more effort,
02:31 more money put behind it if we're gonna do the signature gathering.
02:34 Let's really go all in here and make sure it's not just a failed kind of effort.
02:38 So a similar thing happened in 2022 actually in Missouri.
02:43 And we'll have to see if it's different this time around.
02:46 That didn't get the number of signatures.
02:47 So some hope in Missouri, but ultimately it faces kind of the same murky roadblocks.
02:53 And you have to question whether or not the industry is really gonna go all in on
02:57 trying to legalize Missouri this year.
02:59 [MUSIC]