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  • 4/9/2025
Transcript
00:00this breaking news that we got yesterday that of all states maybe hawaii will be the 40th in the
00:07united states to legalize sports betting you know i would have bet heavily against that i mean this
00:12is a place that i thought that they didn't want sports betting because again so many people are
00:17there on vacation spending money on the economy but hey i guess i suppose we don't really know
00:23what's going on behind the scenes we certainly don't know what the tax numbers look like as well
00:27yeah one short bet in this wild pace of sports betting legislation we're in now has been not
00:35really knowing who's next we've talked about minnesota we've talked about missouri we'll talk
00:39about alabama a little bit but lo and behold one of the states that pretty much has no legal gambling
00:45at all they don't even have a state lottery and they have some history with gambling corruption
00:51there which has created kind of a resistant landscape to just legalizing these gambling in
00:57general lo and behold hawaii emerges as possibly the only state this year that will legalize sports
01:02betting a wild development yesterday the senate officially passed a sports betting bill which has
01:09been the biggest hurdle so far has been the senate it passed the senate 15 to 10 it now goes back to
01:15the house where the bill originated which needs to sign off on any of the senate changes but once the
01:20house signs off which kind of all signs are pointing to yes then it would go to governor josh
01:26green's desk who has been supportive of legalizing sports betting so it's shaping up to be we could
01:31very realistically have online sports books in hawaii in a quick amount of time the changes that the
01:38senate passed yesterday were they got rid or they restored a 250 000 license fee that was taken out of
01:46the original bill as well as a 10 tax rate so what the house needs to do is just kind of sign off on the
01:52original changes there might be some negotiating there um on small terms but it seems like most
01:57of the big hurdles have been cleared if it goes to green's desk and he signs it it would also legalize
02:02fantasy sports so another one of those few states that hasn't even had fantasy sports this would be a huge
02:07hurdle if they legalized both sports betting and fantasy sports at the same time it would allow for
02:13up to four online sports betting apps as well as the fantasy sports applications uh there was kind of
02:19some bumps in the road between who would oversee this department hawaii doesn't have a ton of money
02:25to allocate resources to this kind of thing so originally it was supposed to go to the department
02:29of consumer protection they said they weren't equipped to do it so now it's going to be the department of law
02:33enforcement which oversees it kind of a wrinkle here is the bill would allow sports betting to take
02:39effect by july 1st of this year so very very aggressive timeline you know missouri legalized last year
02:46we're still waiting on them to get their framework forward that creates a little bit of a worry among
02:50lawmakers who is are kind of worried that maybe the department of law enforcement won't have the
02:55resources necessary in time to get up to speed here if i had to guess um the industry is going to
03:01try to provide them with those resources come together figure out how they can get this as soon as
03:05possible um if that can't happen maybe it would be a later timeline less aggressive by football season
03:12we've seen certainly seen states move timelines around before um but very encouraging for uh
03:18constituents in hawaii oftentimes you have um you know late games between the university of hawaii and
03:23whoever else is on the west coast on and it's a big gambling thing for sports bettors with not much
03:27else on so the fact that they could get in on uh some of the tax revenue here and reap some of the
03:32benefits for the state is very significant news especially for a state that hasn't had any forms of
03:36legalized sports betting or legalized gaming yeah

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