HARRISBURG — On a mid-January morning in 2020, the state’s top gambling regulators privately gathered inside a conference room at their downtown Harrisburg offices with lobbyists for Parx Casino, the largest in the state.
The meeting that day was the culmination of an intense, behind-the-scenes push to influence the decision-making of the agency tasked with being an independent arbiter of gambling in Pennsylvania. The effort is captured in emails and other documents, obtained by Spotlight PA, that are now part of a bare-knuckle legal fight over expanding gambling in Pennsylvania.The records provide a glimpse into the vigorous lobbying of public officials that the public rarely sees.
He also said the meeting with Parx’s lobbyists did not influence the board’s stance on skill games, and that it was instead fueled by a number of factors, including a judge’s remarks in the fall of 2019 in one of the myriad court rulings involving skill games. The inaction has allowed skill games to operate in a regulatory no man’s land: They are not specifically authorized in the state’s gambling law, which means they’ve been able to avoid the hefty taxes paid by casino slots on revenues — and make more money off their machines.
Parx Casino, based in Bensalem, led the pack of the state’s 16 casinos and mini-casinos in revenue generated from slots, raking in nearly $394 million last year. At $204.8 million, it came in second in revenue raised from table games. In a Dec. 18, 2019 email, Ryan Skoczylas, Tomlinson’s then-chief of staff, told three lobbyists for Parx that the senator had met with someone from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board.
The records suggest they made progress with those government lawyers: “The attorneys involved in the state’s brief reached out … and want to have a conversation. We consider that to be good news that they want to talk,” Dick Gmerek, another Parx lobbyist, wrote to Tomlinson’s office on Dec. 30, 2019.
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