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March 13, 2026

Florida News December 8, 2024

Court Ruling Could Boost South Florida Gambling

Florida News ı By USA Herald

793 0 Comments

By DARA KAM
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

©2017 The News Service of Florida. All rights reserved. Posting or forwarding this material without permission is prohibited. You can view the Terms of Use on our website.

THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, April 4, 2017......... In a decision that opens the door for a poker room in downtown Miami --- and possibly others throughout South Florida --- an appeals court on Tuesday decided that gambling regulators were wrong to deny a new pari-mutuel permit to a Miami operator.

The 1st District Court of Appeal decision is a major victory for West Flagler Associates, which operates Magic City Casino in Miami and plans to open a cardroom downtown.

The dispute between West Flagler and the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation, centers on “summer” jai alai permits, the source of several previous legal challenges. The permits allow pari-mutuels to operate lucrative cardrooms.

The case stems from a Florida law that creates the possibility of converting other pari-mutuel permits to summer jai alai permits. The law allows Miami-Dade and Broward pari-mutuels that have the lowest betting handle for two consecutive years to convert to summer jai alai permits. But if those pari-mutuels do not seek conversion, other facilities can seek the permits.

In 2015, West Flagler applied for a summer jai alai permit based on the handle from 2012 and 2013 after Hialeah Park Race Track did not seek to convert its permit to a summer jai alai permit.

But gambling regulators rejected West Flagler's application, arguing that the statute only allowed the granting of a new summer jai alai permit based on "the two consecutive years next prior to filing an application."

Because West Flagler's application was filed in 2015, "your application is incapable of being approved," the Division of Pari-mutuel Wagering wrote to John Lockwood, a lawyer representing the pari-mutuel, in September 2015.

But, siding with Lockwood's arguments Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal found that the language in the statute regarding the "two next years prior" only applied to pari-mutuels that want to convert their permits to summer jai alai permits, not to pari-mutuels seeking new permits.

The "plain meaning" of the law "creates two separate ways for permittees to obtain a summer jai alai permit," and "the Division's conflation of these two distinct permit opportunities improperly imposed unrelated timing requirements on the 'new permit' language,” Judge Harvey Jay wrote in a six-page opinion joined by judges Timothy Osterhaus and Allen Winsor.

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