Opinion: Gaming interests prepare for next attack on Florida

Right now, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and his team are trying to cut a new deal with the Seminoles. Part of the current pact, which brings a chunk of more than $2 billion annual casino profits to the state treasury in return for reining in other gambling, is about to expire, and the state wants to increase the $1 billion it collected from the tribe over the past five years.

Once that deal is set, the mega-casino interests will have a better lay of the land on the battlefield for their own assault on Florida. That tribal compact could be done by summer. Then it would go to Washington to approve, as any state deal with a tribe must.

That deal would come far too late to produce new laws to permit mega-casinos in our annual legislative session that ends May 2. While Gov. Scott could call a special session on gambling, he’d need to weigh what that could mean to his chances in the November election.

Would a governor pushing to open doors far wider to gambling be more or less popular with voters? Unless our economy nosedives, he’s better off playing up economic victories, real or imagined, than he is campaigning for casinos to bail out a leaky economy that he’s at the helm of.

That could buy us more time before gambling’s next assault.