The bill formerly known as the Mississippi Mobile Sports Wagering Act was given its final approval on Thursday by the state Senate, giving lawmakers more time to hammer out their disagreements about the legislation and reach a compromise that could authorize mobile wagering more broadly.
House Bill 774 was passed by the Mississippi Senate on Tuesday but a motion to reconsider was entered and not addressed until Thursday, the last day for the chamber to reconsider and pass bills that originated in the House of Representatives. The Mississippi legislature is scheduled to adjourn on May 5.
With those deadlines looming, senators voted on Thursday to table the motion to reconsider, ending their work on the bill and teeing it up for a return to the House.
The Senate approved an amended version of H.B. 774, which was essentially stripped of all of its mobile sports wagering provisions, including its title. Before those changes were made by the Senate Gaming Committee, the bill proposed to legalize online sports and race betting throughout the state via operators partnered with brick-and-mortar casinos.
Comments made by Sen. David Blount, chairman of the gaming committee, suggest they expect the House will reject the changes and that a conference committee will be established to try to resolve the differences between lawmakers.
"The bill that was held on the motion simply brings forward the [Mississippi Code] sections that were in the bill originally passed by the House," Blount said on the Senate floor on Thursday. "There is no new language. I anticipate the House will invite conference when we send this back over to them."
How we got here
Mississippi sports betting has nearly 30 commercial and tribal casinos that offer in-person betting and pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing. At some facilities, mobile apps can be used while a player is on the property to place wagers. That is where the mobile wagering ends, though, as there is no legal option for statewide online sports betting and pari-mutuel wagering.
The version of H.B. 774 passed by the House of Representatives in early February, and then transmitted to the Senate, would have changed that status quo and allowed statewide mobile wagering. The legislation was referred to the Senate Gaming Committee in late February but was not acted on until early April, which is when senators voted to amend the legislation in a way that removed all the mobile sports wagering components from the measure.
The move sounded bad, but it was intended to keep the debate around online sports betting going in the legislature and to get the bill out of committee ahead of a key legislative deadline.
H.B. 774 was then passed as amended by the Senate on Tuesday, before a motion to reconsider was entered, setting up a vote on reconsideration on Thursday.
Mississippi update: the Senate passed a House bill that used to authorize statewide online sports betting but was then gutted by a Senate committee, removing all of its mobile wagering provisions. That bill, HB774, now awaits reconsideration:https://t.co/uy8tnAD6Jj @Covers
— Geoff Zochodne (@GeoffZochodne) April 11, 2024
The Senate’s changes to H.B. 774 are unlikely to be accepted by the House because gone are all the mobile sports wagering provisions the House supported.
Mississippi, meanwhile, remains one of 20 states that does not have mobile sports wagering broadly available within its borders.
It does, however, have a sizable brick-and-mortar casino industry, which is one of the factors lawmakers have had to consider during their discussions in the legislature and, before then, as members of a task force that investigated mobile wagering in the state.
"There are a lot of issues that we need to consider from the perspective of the industry and also from the perspective of the consumer," Blount said during a brief committee meeting last week. "But in the meantime, we certainly don't want to stop people from listening to each other and working."
