Change rules for charity raffles

This editorial appeared in the Harrisburg Patriot-News last week.

At the end of May, the Las Vegas Sands casino opened with a symbolic chain-cutting ceremony in Bethlehem. The Sands is the eighth operating casino in Pennsylvania.

Last week, Rep. Bill DeWeese, D-Greene, introduced legislation to create table games at state casinos.

While the push mounts for table games and the opening of the remaining large casinos in the state, the General Assembly appears to have forgotten our charitable organizations.

Constant fundraising is a necessity for most charitable organizations and even more so during the current downturn.

As anyone who has ever been to a charitable raffle or bingo night knows, “small games of chance” are a vital revenue source for many non-profits, including fire departments and rescue squads.

Nonprofits are not permitted to be doing anything like what the big casinos can do these days. “Monte Carlo” style nights are forbidden under current regulations, as are any electrical games like slots. Instead charities can hold raffles and drawings or use punchboards, pull-tabs or bingo.

Charities are further hampered by the limits on payouts for these games. For example, the current maximum payout is $500 for any single game with a weekly prize limit of $5,000. The issue is that these limits were set in 1988 and have not been changed since.

If your boss were still paying you what he or she paid you in 1988, you would be outraged.

Here we are over two decades later: The legislature needs to revisit and revise the small games of chance laws.

To give credit where credit is due, two years ago the state House passed legislation to increase the payout limits for small games of chance and bingo. Then the legislation stalled and died in the Senate.

There’s new hope this year. Rep. Tom Solobay, D-Washington, has introduced a bill (HB 169) to raise the payout limits and to allow monthly raffles and “vertical wheel games” (think color or number wheels). A similar bill (SB 211) has also been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Mike Folmer, R-Lebanon, that would raise the single game limit to $1,000 and the weekly limit to $20,000.

Unfortunately, the bills were sent to the appropriations committees in April for further deliberation. With all the hoopla around the budget, both committees are obviously sidelined in budget gridlock. But these committees need to remember that charities, too, are under budget duress and could use the increased payouts for their games of chance now more than ever.

We encourage the House and Senate to move this legislation in the coming weeks. It has bipartisan support unlike many other issues on the legislature’s agenda these days.

While we cut chains to open new casinos in the state, we should not be chaining our charities to outdated gaming laws.