“It Looks Highly Unlikely”
Massachusetts House speaker Sal DiMasi said yesterday that lawmakers would concentrate on health care and other issues in the waning days of the fall legislative session and were not likely to take up the slots bill that was passed by the Senate 26-9 in October. ”I can’t say for sure that I’m going to say, ‘No,’ for this year, but it doesn’t look likely — it looks highly unlikely,” DiMasi told the Boston Globe.
The bill would have allowed 2,000 slot machines to be installed at each of the state’s four racetracks. As written now, the slots measure is part of a simulcasting bill that must be passed this year for the tracks to remain open. There’s no mention in the article of that complication, but I would bet that’s because the plan is to uncouple the two once it becomes clear slots are really, truly dead this year and pass the uncontroversial simulcasting portion in the session’s final hours.
Or not: Track owners say they’re preparing to hand out pink slips, just in case a simulcasting-only bill isn’t passed.
