ST. PAUL, Minn. - Gamblers would love electronic pulltabs. Cash would flow and the state's cut from the new games would pay the public share of a new Vikings stadium. That's what Gov. Mark Dayton and other politicians predicted. A year later, that billion-dollar promise has mostly been a bust. Revenue is down nearly 100 percent from projections. Bar owners dismiss e-pulltabs as not worth the cost and hassle to install. Gamblers say the electronic games just aren't that much fun. A fiscal train wreck? More like a plane crash, Dayton told MPR News. "The National Transportation Safety Board says that in an airplane crash, there's seldom just one factor, one mistake that is the sole causation, and I would say in this case as well," Dayton said in a recent interview. "You know, there were multiple errors made, and in hindsight, obviously we were terribly wrong. But everything, as far as I know, was done in good faith with the best of intentions." The NTSB typically identifies who's at fault in plane crashes. A year into e-pulltabs, people are still picking through the pieces, trying to understand what happened. "We all agreed that we didn't want to use general revenue funds, so this was a new source of revenue, and one that everyone who was involved appeared to believe," said Dayton, who backed a hike in cigarette and corporate taxes to finance the Vikings stadium bonds after it was clear e-pulltabs were falling short. These projections were as good as anybody could do." Few see it as clearly now as former Republican State Sen. Amy Koch. As Senate majority leader in 2011, she was among the inner circle debating a stadium deal, and eventually voted to approve the plan in the Senate. After she left the Legislature she bought a Maple Lake bowling alley and the bar and grill attached to it, complete with an e-pulltab business. Koch says the state got some key things wrong when it banked on electronic pulltabs. First was the expectation that 2,500 bars would install more than 15,000 games as fast as they could plug them in. The latest count has about 300 bars and only about 1,300 games. "The bars, it's incredibly expensive to put them in," Koch said. "I'm not a big bar. There are smaller bars, yet. There's no way they're going to be able to afford to buy equipment and take six, eight months to pay off your investment and then see maybe a couple hundred bucks a month. It's not worth the trouble." Meanwhile she says many customers still prefer paper pulltabs. That's been true all over the state. As electronic pulltabs have flopped, regular pulltabs are actually booming. Charitable gambling revenue overall was up by 8 percent last year over the year before. [On the other hand...]
..."The problems though, aren't a reason to give up on electronic gambling," said Al Lund, who heads Allied Charities of Minnesota, which represents about half the state's charitable gambling operators.
"The distribution, accounting and playing experience of electronic pulltabs have a clear advantage over the paper games and will likely give charities more money for more causes in the long run," he said.
"If there were no examples of people that had taken this new technology and run with it and had great success, I would be in the camp of people that said maybe this wasn't a good idea," Lund said.
"But I looked at the top 10 sites in August and they netted $81,000. I would call that good. Is it as good as we'd hoped? Absolutely not."
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