The Bahamas Hotel Association (BHA), which today holds a Board of Directors & Membership meeting at the Wyndham Nassau Resort & Crystal Palace Casino, has a primary objective to do ‘everything possible to promote, increase and regulate tourism’. In August the BHA said it estimated that the sector would return to pre-recession numbers by the second quarter of 2011. The Association’s Casino Committee is pressing for gaming laws in the Bahamas to be updated.

President of the BHA, Robert Sands, recently told Tribune Business newspaper that the BHA had resubmitted far-reaching proposals to the government for gaming law reform. Many feel this reform is long overdue, with the Bahamas losing market share year over year. Increased competition in the United States and other Caribbean countries has prompted Kerzner International to invest some $25 million in upgrading the Atlantis. It is hoped that a state-of-the-art casino resort will be able to compete with new operations such as the Seminole casinos in Florida and those to be created under Jamaica’s Casino Gaming Act 2010, signed into law in May.

The BHA supports the introduction of a national lottery and allowing foreign residents to gamble in the casinos. Apart from the Churches there is general support in the Bahamas for gambling laws to be liberalised, particularly as police resources are spent in pursuing illegal lottery operators and their clients. As one resident says in answer to an anti-gambling speech by one of the Bishops, “The time has come to legalise the culture of number buying and gambling generally in The Bahamas.”

According to Sands, the Government is looking at gambling law reform and proposals are being considered under advisement. However, although there was wide expectation that gambling reform would be mentioned in April’s Throne speech at the opening of Parliament, it was not. For the present it remains for gambling proponents to keep the issue alive and continue pressing for more liberal laws governing the sector, even if they are unlikely to get government or opposition party support for allowing all Bahamians to gamble at the islands’ casinos. (E-10.07.10)

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