Illinois Lawmakers Reject Plan to Merge Gaming and Racing Boards
Illinois lawmakers adjourned for the summer without advancing Governor JB Pritzker’s proposal to consolidate the state’s two gambling regulators into a single executive agency.
The plan, included in Pritzker’s FY2027 budget, would have merged the Illinois Gaming Board and the Illinois Racing Board into a Department of Gaming Regulation and Enforcement, eliminating both boards’ appointed members and their public meeting requirements.
House Speaker Emanuel Welch said there was simply “no appetite for it,” and that members needed considerably more information than the administration had provided before they could act. Senate President Don Harmon echoed the same message to the governor. Both leaders told Pritzker the votes were not there. The proposal could return during the fall veto session, though Pritzker faces a third-term gubernatorial campaign in November that may complicate his leverage with a legislature that moves on its own timeline.
Two Agencies Sharing Responsibilities Made Sense, the New Lack of Transparencey Did Not
The administrative case for the merger had some angles that made sense, which would lead one to think it had a chance. The Illinois Racing Board currently oversees just two struggling racetracks, Fairmount Park and Hawthorne Race Course, while the Gaming Board is responsible for policing 16 casinos, more than 49,000 video gaming terminals outside casinos, and one of the country’s top sports betting markets, on a staff that has been perennially described as understaffed. Consolidating the administrative functions of an agency that has too little to do with those of another that has too much on its plate is a straightforward efficiency argument.
What the administration could not fully accept was the structural objection to moving gambling regulation behind closed doors. Both existing boards hold public meetings where appointed members deliberate and vote on licensing, operator suitability, and disciplinary matters. The proposed Department of Gaming Regulation and Enforcement would not have been subject to the open meetings law, thereby replacing public deliberation with internal administrative decisions and legislative oversight through periodic reporting requirements.
State Sen. Bill Cunningham, who oversees gambling legislation in the Senate, acknowledged that consolidation could reduce administrative duplication, but said he was unwilling to accept the elimination of public oversight without agreement on what would replace it. “The administration agreed that it is important for some oversight to be in place,” he said. “But an agreement was not reached on what exactly that should look like.”
From Multiple Angles, Transparency is Extremely Necesary for Gaming Board Decisions
In most states, the transparency argument against a regulatory merger would be a procedural concern worth weighing against the efficiency gains. In Illinois, it carries more specific weight, given the recent record of the Gaming Board it would have absorbed.
The Gaming Board has faced scrutiny over multiple incidents during Pritzker’s tenure and under gaming administrator Marcus Fruchter. These include the Bally’s Chicago casino, which used a waste-hauling contractor the FBI identified as tied to organized crime, and a politically connected banker with alleged unsavory associations who received a video gaming license after Gaming Board staff initially raised serious concerns about his application. Fruchter declined to explain the latter decision publicly.
Pritzker himself has had casino investments, including a prior ownership stake in the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin that he later sold, and publicly available records showing one or more trusts benefiting him once held interests in casinos in Indiana and the Niagara Falls area. His office has declined to detail the full extent of those holdings.
Against that backdrop, the proposal to move gaming regulation into an executive agency accountable primarily to the governor’s office, rather than to a public board whose deliberations are open to the press and public, reads differently than a routine administrative efficiency measure. The two legislative leaders who blocked the proposal, Welch and Harmon, have collectively received more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from a single video gambling company, Accel Entertainment, since 2019, a detail that cuts both ways: it suggests the legislators have their own industry relationships to manage, but it also means they have strong incentives to maintain the kind of public oversight apparatus that keeps those relationships visible rather than opaque.
Back to the Drawing Board Following Summer Adjournment
The failure of the merger proposal leaves Illinois with a fragmented but public-facing regulatory structure at precisely the moment that structure faces its most complex period of expansion. The state has been adding video gaming terminal licenses, managing a sports betting market with tax rates reaching 40% plus a per-wager fee, watching the prediction markets fight play out in federal courts, and facing ongoing legislative pressure to legalize online casino gaming that Attorney General Kwame Raoul has predicted will happen at some point. All of this while its Casino revenue continues to grow month over month.
Each of those product categories raises distinct regulatory questions that the Gaming Board will now have to address through its existing structure. Whether that structure is adequate to the task, given the staffing concerns and the questions about its independence that the past two years have raised, is a question the legislature deferred rather than answered when it blocked the merger.
Pritzker’s argument that fragmented oversight produces less accountability than a unified agency has real merit as a governance theory. The legislature’s counterargument, that the particular unified agency he proposed would produce less public accountability than the fragmented system it replaced, also has real merit given the specific circumstances. Neither side was necessarily wrong in its take; they just could not agree on a structure that addressed both concerns, and the summer adjournment means Illinois will have to try again.
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