Maryland’s new gambling director says he has no timeline for getting the state’s slots program up and running.
“I’m still trying to get my sea legs,” Stephen Martino said three days into taking the helm at the state lottery agency.
Maryland’s slow-to-move slots program has frustrated the state since fall 2008, when residents voted to legalize 15,000 slots at five locations. None of the sites has opened, and Maryland’s lottery agency has been unable to secure bids at two sites.
Martino spent nearly three years setting up the country’s first state-owned casino in Kansas, where he was head of the state’s gambling commission.
“The biggest challenge is always the first facility,” said Martino, tapped last week by Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Kansas lawmakers approved plans for four casinos in April 2007. Four months ago, Martino opened Kansas’ first casino, with 584 slot machines and 12 card game tables. The $90 million project in Dodge City was the smallest and least expensive of the four proposals.
“It’s optimal you’d like to have someone [lead Maryland’s agency] that had a record of putting in the operation a lot faster than they did in Kansas,” said Jeffrey C. Hooke, a Bethesda gambling analyst. “It was just a mess.”
But Hooke said lawmakers were primarily responsible for the delay.
“The laws passed in Kansas were very unrealistic,” he said, calling the casino plans “Taj Mahal-type projects.”
Martino laid off gambling employees and reworked license agreements to ease the delays. During his five-year tenure, two racetracks closed and several contractors — including Baltimore-based Cordish Co. — withdrew bids for the still-unlicensed casinos.
“The economy has not been a friend in this process,” Martino said. Cordish left Kansas to bid for a slots palace at the Anne Arundel Mills shopping mall in Maryland. Martino said the Anne Arundel project is “tied up in the courts” and “out of [his] hands.”
“I realize people probably believe things did not happen as quickly in Maryland as they would have liked,” Martino said. “That was exactly the case in Kansas.”
Before he left Kansas, Martino landed a $386 million contract with Penn National Gaming to build a second casino, with 2,300 slot machines and 90 card game tables. He reports Dodge City’s casino is now grossing about $5 million per month — 22 percent of which goes to the state.
