Chuck-e-Cheese and Dave & Buster’s need not worry for much longer. The Alaska Legislature is preparing a bill to shield arcades from the state’s gambling laws.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance Senate Bill 157, which formally states that gambling does not include an “amusement device” that “confers only tickets, credits, allowances, tokens, or anything of value that can be redeemed for toys, candy, or electronic novelties.”
The bill now goes to the Senate Rules Committee to be put on the calendar for a vote of the full Senate. A companion bill has been introduced in the House and is awaiting a hearing in the House Labor and Commerce Committee.
Sen. Lesil McGuire, R-Anchorage and chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary committee, introduced the bill to solve a concern raised by Dave & Buster’s, a nationwide entertainment company planning a 44,000 square-foot arcade/restaurant/bar complex at Dimond Center Mall in Anchorage.
According to testimony at a previous meeting of the judiciary committee, the complex is expected to employ up to 160 people and involve up to $23 million in construction spending. Anchorage is the No. 2 city in the nation for per-capita restaurant spending, said Jay Tobin, vice president and general counsel for Dave & Buster’s. (No. 1 is New York City and No. 3 is San Francisco, he noted.) Combined with the presence of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the University of Alaska-Anchorage, plus the fact that Anchorage is a hub for Alaska travelers and shoppers, Dave & Buster’s was willing to overlook the fact that the city has a population lower than its normal benchmark for opening a restaurant and arcade.
The only hurdle was a 2001 opinion from Dean Guaneli, chief assistant attorney general for the Department of Law’s criminal division.
In that opinion, Guaneli wrote that the state’s gambling laws, as written, prohibited a Golden Tee golf arcade machine from offering prizes.
“The short answer to this question is that paying to play such amusement devices for prizes is illegal gambling,” he wrote.
“As I’m reading this, Chuck-e-Cheese is illegal?” Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, asked in a committee hearing discussing the issue.
“I would say they are taking what I would regard as a calculated business risk,” said Howard Trickey, an Anchorage attorney hired by Dave & Buster’s.
While Chuck-e-Cheese operates on a franchise model, and those risks are the responsibility of individual stores, Dave & Buster’s is centrally operated, which meant the risks were weighed differently.
McGuire said as she sees it, the state’s policy has been to generally not stand in the way of family businesses, and so she introduced a bill with “cleanup language” to fix the problem.
“If there is a place where a state law creates a question that is impeding new job opportunities for Alaskans, then that is a place where the Legislature is going to take the time to address it,” she said.
The bill hasn’t kept McGuire from work on the state’s bigger problems, either. McGuire is the chief sponsor of a bill to use earnings from the Permanent Fund to help balance the state’s annual deficit. That bill is expected to receive its first hearing at 9 a.m. today in the Senate State Affairs Committee.
Public testimony on the possibility of using Permanent Fund earnings to fund state government will be taken at 5:30 p.m. tonight in the Capitol. The public is encouraged to attend.
