Governor Phil Bryant signed SB 2541 Thursday, officially legalizing and regulating daily fantasy sports (DFS) in the state of Mississippi. Mississippi is the fourth state to approve of DFS this year, behind Indiana, Virginia, and neighboring Tennessee.
The bill took a roundabout way to become a law. In March, the bill, called the “Fantasy Contest Act,” was passed overwhelmingly by the Senate. As happens in all state legislatures, it was then shuttled on over to the House. The House, though, changed it into a completely different bill, removing the DFS legalization and regulation language (so basically everything) and instead creating a “Fantasy Contest Gaming Study Committee.” A state lottery was also authorized by the bill via a hand-written and signed amendment. Hand-written. Nobody could even take the time to type something up. That version of the bill passed the House, but because it was so FUBAR, something had to be done to fix things.
Thus, a special conference committee was created, consisting of three Senators and three Representatives. The six lawmakers reworked SB 2541, getting rid of the lottery language and re-instating the DFS regulations. It went on to pass both the House and Senate with no problem. One has to wonder what the hell was on the minds of the members of the House to screw things up so much.
Governor Bryant was expected to sign the bill into law, as it received so much support in the legislature, that they would have likely overridden a veto had it come to that.
One aspect of the bill that will be welcomed by the daily fantasy operators is that there will be no licensing fees assessed. The original Senate bill would have instituted an annual licensing fee of either $30,000 or five percent of a sites entry fees, whichever was greater. This would have been a huge burden on the industry’s smaller operators, who likely would not have even bothered to apply for a license in Mississippi had that fee been in place. Only FanDuel, DraftKings, and Yahoo! would have been able to afford that price.
With the bill, the “Fantasy Contest Task Force” is created, which would be tasked with reviewing the operators and contests and recommending appropriate regulations. Nothing other than the lack of a licensing fee is unusual in the Mississippi bill. Players would have to be 18-years old or older, DFS site employees and their immediate family would be prohibited from playing, operating funds must be segregated from player funds, and players protections, such as the ability to self-exclude, must be put into place.
The DFS law is actually set to expire on July 1st, 2017, so if it does, it would be assumed that DFS would once again become illegal. Odds are that if everything is going well in DFS world in the state that the law will be renewed.