Another hearing for SB 900, the bill to regulate online casino and poker in PA (full text here, OPR summary here).

The agenda and link to live stream are located here:
http://www.senatorward.com/2015/06/1...-e-sb-700-etc/

What to like about the hearing:

• Second hearing in as many weeks
• Topics to be covered are nuts-and-bolts work, suggesting a genuine legislative attempt as opposed to dog-and-pony show
• Topics are relatively "deep" suggesting the legislative legwork is actually being done behnd the scenes

Related: Positive notes from many PA lawmakers in this article from KMT.

goooooooo

also **** casino

Senator McGarrigle's response to me yesterday. He says he supports the internet gaming part of the bill but has reservations about other parts of the bill.

Hearing is over, replay will probably be posted here:

http://www.senatorward.com/2015/06/1...-e-sb-700-etc/

Steve Ruddock did a live blog at USPoker.

My takeaway was that the hearing was, on balance, positive. Regulators indicated definitively that they were ready to get online up and running and that the tech in place should assuage lawmaker's concerns regarding id verification, age verification, fraud, and so on.

Sen. Tomlinson continued to hit the tax issue (and, to a lesser extent, the in-person registration issue). The tax issue is likely a major stumbling block, but a resolvable one.

Sen. Wiley (https://twitter.com/senatorwiley) suggested he'd like more time to study the issue and carried a general theme of uncertainty about the impacts of online gambling throughout the hearing.

Replay of hearing is now live here.

I also posted the hearing packet which contains submitted testimony and some odds and ends here.

Finally, we have a summary of the hearing with some brief analysis of what's next for PA online poker here.