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A division within Washington state's attorney general's office has rejected ethics complaints filed by Maverick Gaming against two state gaming commissioners over their role in blocking centralized surveillance of cardrooms.
The CEO of Maverick, which owns more than a dozen cardrooms in Washington state, alleged before a Washington State Gambling Commission (WSGC) meeting earlier this month that conflicts of interest on the commission are directly resulting in the loss of “family wager jobs and critical tax revenue”.
Eric Persson also filed ethics complaints with the state attorney general’s office, outlining his concerns with commissioners Anders Ibsen and Michael Charles.
Persson alleged that both commissioners violated the state’s “appearance of fairness doctrine” and regulations that bar public officials from “activities incompatible with their public duties”.
“Commissioners Ibsen and Charles are political appointees who have documented political and financial interests with tribal nations in our state that are business competitors of Maverick Gaming,” Persson testified at the May 8 meeting.
“Their actions are deliberately disadvantaging real jobs and a regulated business like any other in our home state,” he added.
On Monday (May 19), Kate Reynolds, executive director of the Washington State Executive Ethics Board, confirmed the board received both complaints but “neither was opened for investigation”. The WSGC declined to comment on the issue.
“We are reviewing the response to our initial ethics complaints and determining next steps, including sharing additional information with the Ethics Board about the conflicts of interest demonstrated by these two commissioners,” Persson said in a statement emailed to Vixio GamblingCompliance on Tuesday.
The WSGC in January denied a petition to update the surveillance regulation, with Ibsen, who brought the motion to deny, citing WSGC staff concerns and reminding licensees that the regulator is not an economic development agency.
Maverick first submitted the petition in November 2021. After concerns were expressed, the company withdrew the petition in February 2023 to work with WSGC staff before resubmitting it in February 2024.
Vicki Christophersen, a lobbyist for Maverick, said there are fiscal concerns for the company in modernizing the surveillance systems.
“For any businesses that are operating in the red, you have to make tough decisions, and it is true Maverick operates multiple locations and some of them operate in the red and have been doing so for over a year,” she told commissioners in January.
Christophersen said centralized surveillance allows the company to create efficiencies, as well as improve access and safety. Maverick has been granted variances to operate centralized surveillance systems at its casinos in rural areas of Nevada and Colorado.
A Maverick Gaming spokesman told Vixio that the company believes conflicts such as the ones raised in their ethics complaints “have influenced other policymaking processes as well at the commission, including increasing wager limits two years ago”.
When house-banked cardrooms were legalized in 1997, wager limits were $25. But this has been raised four times, with the latest increase to $400 in 2023.
Maverick Gaming petitioned the WSGC in 2022 to hike the wager limit to $500 to cope with inflation, but after extensive public hearings, the amount was limited to $400.
Maverick Petitions Supreme Court Over Washington Sports-Betting Law
Meanwhile, Maverick Gaming is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to undo a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that dismissed its challenge to a Washington state law enabling tribes to conduct sports betting, but not operate cardrooms.
Judge Kim Wardlaw of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District wrote that Maverick could not challenge the state’s sports-betting compact with tribes because the company attempted to join the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, a necessary party, to its lawsuit without the tribe's consent.
As the tribe is shielded by sovereign immunity in the matter, the lower court rightly dismissed the lawsuit, Wardlaw wrote.
Maverick had claimed that state-tribal compacts allowing sports betting on tribal lands violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and the Equal Protection Clause and Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Wardlaw noted that although Maverick sought relief that would invalidate all tribal gaming compacts in Washington, the company did not include any of these tribes as parties to the suit.
Attorneys for Maverick submitted a petition for writ of certiorari on May 9, arguing the case amounts to an acknowledged conflict with the federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The APA provides that any person “adversely affected or aggrieved by agency action … is entitled to judicial review.”
A response is due by June 12, according to case documents posted on the Supreme Court’s website.
“The question presented is of paramount importance and amply warrants this court’s review,” wrote Matthew McGill, an attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher representing Maverick. “In the nation’s largest circuit, the right to APA review evaporates if an absent sovereign asserts an interest in federal agency action but declines to mount a defense.”
McGill wrote in his 46-page filing that that approach “threatens to sound the death knell for any judicial review of executive decision-making in the wide range of cases in which agency actions implicate the interests of Indian tribes”.
McGill wrote that the lawsuit is about challenging the “tribal gaming monopoly in Washington”, alleging that approval by the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior of amendments to tribal-state compacts allowing for sports betting was “not in accordance with law”.
Specifically, McGill alleged that the interior secretary is required to disapprove the compact amendments because they violate IGRA and other federal laws, in part by authorizing gaming activity that is otherwise unlawful throughout the state.
McGill believes the amendments violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection by granting a monopoly to Indian tribes, and were executed in violation of the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle because the IGRA purports to require states to negotiate gaming compacts with Indian tribes.
