No action on Internet cafes

COLUMBUS

Before breaking for the summer, lawmakers passed a ginormous gambling bill, with dozens of provisions related to horse racing tracks, casinos and state-run video slots.

Also tucked into that legislation was a year-long moratorium on the opening of sweepstakes parlors — essentially storefronts offering unregulated gambling, jumping through loopholes in Ohio Revised Code that lawmakers have not yet closed.

The language in the new law also required existing Internet cafes to file affidavits with the attorney general’s office, notifying the state of their existence.

The deadline to submit those affidavits was this past week. The final tally: 667 gaming parlors, operating outside of state law, with no checks or balances or anything to ensure they’re not ripping off the Ohioans who frequent the premises.

State licenses

The result was more than twice the estimate Attorney General Mike DeWine had offered earlier in the year, as part of his continued calls on the legislature to do something to stop the expansion of these parlors and require such locations to obtain state licenses and be subject to other gambling laws and requirements.

Three northern Ohio counties — Cuyahoga, Lorain and Lake — accounted for a combined 211 Internet cafes. Fifteen others had sites in the double digits, including Stark, Trumbull (37), Mahoning (29), Summit and Portage. Columbiana County has four.

Twenty-eight of Ohio’s 88 counties had no registered locations.

It’s a safe bet that there are probably more of these businesses that either forgot to register or didn’t know about the requirement.

Parlors began opening shop in earnest after the state cracked down on skill-based gaming, regulating prize values and placing other limits on such operations to stop the proliferation of slot machine-style gambling that was occurring at the time.

But Internet cafe owners figured out a way to continue offering electronic gaming that, opponents say, is very similar to slot machines.

Gaming regulations

Legislation has been introduced in both the Ohio House and Senate that would require sweepstakes parlors to meet gaming regulations comparable to those in place for casinos, but those bills have gone nowhere over the past year.

That seems odd, given the continuing budgetary constraints facing the state and the potential money-flowing tap that regulated Internet cafes would offer to the state coffers.

Yes, people who visit these businesses are adults. They can spend their money anyway they see fit within the confines of the law. If they want to dump dollars into the pockets of parlor operators, so be it.

But Ohioans should be aghast that that lawmakers haven’t done something to ensure these businesses aren’t ripping off citizens.

“These Internet cafes are multiplying at an alarming rate, and I again am encouraging the Ohio General Assembly to act swiftly to regulate them with the same scrutiny as other forms of gaming in Ohio,” DeWine said in a released statement. “Ohioans currently have no way of knowing that these games are what the cafes report them to be or if they are being completely ripped off by the owners.”

Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.