The regular legislative session is over in Florida and with it, several gambling bills have died for the year.
The last scheduled day of the 2025 Florida regular legislative session was Friday. Although Sunshine State lawmakers voted on a Concurrent Resolution to reconvene on May 12 and extend the regular session until June 6 in order to complete the still-to-be-agreed budget, the agenda is limited to just a handful of items.
Gambling is not among them.
It means that a slate of proposed gaming bills, including two that could have been interpreted as anti-sweepstakes measures, are done for 2025.
Bills had strong focus on gambling clampdown
Rep. John Snyder’s wide-ranging H1467 passed through the House and was referred to the Senate Rules Committee on April 28, but it never got around to a hearing in the final week of the session.
It would have done many things, including increasing punishments for operating and advertising illegal gambling and making some violations a felony crime, as well as formally legalizing and regulating daily fantasy sports. It was similar in language to several other pieces of legislation, including Sen. Corey Simon’s S1404, which bounced around numerous committees in its original chamber but never made it to the full Senate floor.
Snyder stressed at a recent meeting that his legislation would not have done anything to expand legal gambling but aimed to codify existing language in the state statute.
“What this really does is focus on bad actors and illicit gambling operations of any form or fashion,” said Snyder last month. “We’re trying to curtail that unregulated gambling that can happen in the shadows.”
Other bills, such as Sen. Jonathan Martin’s S1836, Rep. Vicki Lopez’s H1017 and Rep. Webster Barnaby’s H953 (the companion to S1404), also proposed a similar stiffening of punishments for illegal gambling.
Did bills take aim at sweeps?
Both Snyder’s and Simon’s defined internet gambling as when money “or other thing of value” is awarded via an online casino-style game “based on chance, regardless of any application of skill.” Online sports betting also includes the “other thing of value” note.
While those definitions were not as clear as in some states, the provisions around illegal gambling could have been taken to apply to online sweepstakes casinos as well as typical online casinos and sportsbooks.
The Social and Promotional Games Association (SPGA) certainly thought so. In a stateemnt on Monday, the SPGA asserted that both H1467 and S1404 were broad anti-sweepstakes bills that, “attempted to criminalize free-to-play digital entertainment, recklessly expand government control over lawful consumer activity, and needlessly restrict business and innovation.”
Other proposed changes now dead
Several of the slate of now-dead Florida gambling bills also had other measures in common, such as making it a felony for athletes or those with insider information to solicit or accept money with intent to negatively affect their performance.
Both Snyder’s and Simon’s proposals also would have prevented someone from accepting a gaming industry job within two years of leaving a role with the Florida Gaming Control Commission.
Another bill that made some progress through committee, H105, sought to decouple casino operations from live horse racing at Thoroughbred tracks, removing the requirement for tracks to host a minimum number of live races in order to operate casino gaming. That measure, also included in H1467, proved to be controversial among the state’s racing industry.
