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SportsTranscript
00:00appears as though there isn't a lot of opposition right now, which certainly surprised a lot of
00:05people considering it's a place a lot of people vacation that they would accept this coming
00:08through. I got to tell you, this will be the story of the summer as far as a potential state
00:12legalizing sports betting. This certainly would be the story of the legislative session in sports
00:18betting, online gambling, really. Because yeah, no one expected Hawaii to kind of be this dark
00:24horse that just comes through and legalizes. I mean, they're one of two states without any legal
00:29form of gambling, including Utah. And in the past, the most a sports betting bill did was pass
00:35a committee. And this year it passed multiple committees and the house and then the house
00:40and then multiple committees in the Senate and the Senate. And right now what happened was initially
00:46in the house where it originated, they stripped the online sports betting tax rate and license fee.
00:55And they were talking, they said, well, maybe these are too low. Let's keep this discussion
00:59going. Let's strip it and push it forward. What happened was in the Senate, they just put those
01:03original figures back and then they passed it, sent it back to the house. The house said, wait,
01:07we stripped these out because we wanted them to be higher basically. And so now we're going to
01:12conference committee. We've got the members of the conference committee. They need to meet and iron
01:17it out. And that has to happen by May 2nd when the legislator adjourns. And now there isn't,
01:24to your point, a lot of pushback at this point, because both chambers have passed it. And the
01:30governor has came out this week and said, Hey, I'm for this. You know, as long as we have the
01:35right protections in place, this is a good thing. So with the governor on board, both legislative
01:40bodies saying, yeah, let's go for it. And they just need to find those that that right tax rate
01:46and license fees. And then, then it looks like we may have sports betting in Hawaii to your point.
01:50And at the end of the year, we'll see, it could become a race of who launches first Missouri or
01:54Hawaii. We, we don't know yet, but it would be the legend. The legislation has at least four sports
02:01books. And it sounded like the other day in the Boyd earnings call, which I did not listen to,
02:06which they came out initially against Hawaii sports betting in, in this, this process,
02:12because they've got a great tourism business going back and forth between Hawaii and Las Vegas.
02:19It sounds like from their earnings call that they would be eager to launch a sports books in Hawaii.
02:24So, you know, even the people who came out against it are seemingly kind of okay with it. So we'll see
02:29where it goes. It's, I mean, geez, it doesn't seem like to your point, there's opposition standing in
02:35its way at this point. It's just, can legislators get out of their own way and kind of iron it out and
02:41make sure it's, you know, what they want and make sure it's good for the Aloha state.