Can Casino Gambling Give Dallas The Cash Boost It Needs to Pay for More Cops?

While the restrained decorum of the Texas Legislature is far from the ringing arcade tones of rows and rows of slot machines, and there are certainly no busty blondes to blow on your dice, the session can still be a gamble. Representatives and senators file their bills and hope for a big win, but betting on what bills will pass and what will not is, at times, risky.

Bills to expand gambling bills have failed consistently session after session, but still, some Texas lawmakers push their chips in on legalizing gambling in various forms to bring the billion-dollar industry to the Lone Star State. That’s unlikely to change this session, but there are clear signs that attitudes are shifting. In years past, legalizing the lucrative vice was divisive and partisan, with big-name Republicans firmly against it, but as massive casino stakeholders take a seat at the table and put their money down, the support for large-scale gambling grows.

Dallas is arguably the top city in the country for sports business, with several professional teams, including the Cowboys, which regularly ranks as the nation’s most valuable sports franchise. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has offered cautious support for legal sports gambling and has said Texas is losing out on millions of dollars in revenue by not allowing it. Former Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has put his weight behind a push for casinos. As the economic potential begins to outweigh gambling’s stigma, a new element is helping to push the odds in favor of Texas someday expanding legal gaming, especially Dallas: the cops.

The burden of recruiting additional police officers and guaranteeing their pension fund has enough money has become more urgent, thanks to a recently approved ballot proposition. If the Legislature could be persuaded to act, Dallas could follow other cities with legalized gambling and use millions of dollars in tax revenue to make ends meet.

In 2024, against the advice of the City Council, Dallas voters narrowly approved Proposition U, a City Charter amendment that requires the council to add 900 officers to Dallas’ police ranks and maintain a total of 4,000 officers. The proposition also requires 50% of any new city revenue to go directly to police and fire pensions until they are fully funded.

The Dallas Police Department receives the most significant portion of the city’s $5 billion annual budget, approximately 38%, or $1.9 billion. Still, following the passage of Proposition U, the brass faces an uphill battle to meet the new officer quota while simultaneously keeping the number of overtime hours within budget. This feat has proved difficult for the department, and in 2024, the force estimated it would exceed its overtime allotment by $13 million. However, the most significant strain on the budget is the pension, which was $4 billion short as of September.

Dallas needs an instant economic boost in the face of a potential budget crisis brought upon by Proposition U and the existing pension debt, and some City Council members are considering tax revenue from casino gambling as a possible solution. The irony is that several studies have linked legal casino gambling to increased crime rates, meaning the very thing the city might turn to in order to hire more cops could also make hiring them necessary. While other cities have successfully used tax revenue to bolster public safety, the results can vary and some powerful Dallasites don’t consider it a feasible solution.

Dallas' history includes an illustrious roster of wealthy families with skyscraping buildings and art museums in their portfolios. Now, a new cast of plutocrats is influencing the city’s culture by taking hold of the Big D’s robust sports scene, and the most prominent of those are looking to make Dallas the destination for all types of big winners.

“It seems very logical that cities could utilize gambling revenue to supplement the police budget or, in our case, the pension,” Dallas City Council member Chad West said. “We've got to look at all potential revenue sources to shore up the pension, and this is a really easy one.”

When casino tycoon and billionaire Miriam Adelson scooped up the Dallas Mavericks and hundreds of acres of land in Dallas’ Design District and near the site of the former Texas Stadium in Irving, fit for a resort-style casino, the city began to debate whether Dallas could become the next Sin City. At an economic development committee meeting, council member Adam Bazaldua suggested that casino revenue could help the city manage its ever-growing multi-billion dollar police and fire pension shortfall.

"I see this as a huge, missed opportunity if we don't tap into a new statewide source of revenue for police and fire pension," Bazaldua said at the meeting in early 2024.

Dallas Police Department Needs Money

Despite progressively increasing funding year over year, the Dallas Police Department has struggled with staffing, attrition and its pension fund.

Until recently, a city ordinance from 1988 required three police officers per 1,000 residents. According to The Dallas Morning News, the city has only come close to this ratio a few times in almost 40 years. DPD endured an exodus in the mid-2010s when the pension debt was only $3 billion and benefits were facing cuts. At its height in 2011, the department had 3,700 sworn officers. The force now has around 3,100 officers serving 1.3 million Dallasites, throwing off the ratio, and the city’s population has only continued to rise.

Desperate to recruit more officers, the city began offering a $1,000 bonus for police officers who referred and recruited new members. While recruitment remains a nationwide issue, retention issues deepen the blows in Dallas because even if the city could recover the losses sustained in the mid-2010s, there’s no promise it could keep new officers on the force. Retention has become such a pressure point that in 2023, the city began offering a $40,000 incentive for officers who clock 30 years with the department. In light of understaffing, response times are slow, but in the November election, what seemed like a remedy to the years-long battle reached voters.

“It is time to restore Dallas Police Department to historic ratios of officers to citizens, which means hiring roughly 1,000 new police officers with priority — not 500 police officers over the next decade as our interim city manager currently proposes,” reads the Proposition U explanation on the website of Dallas HERO, the group behind getting the measure on the ballot. “Dallas city leaders have prioritized pet projects and wasteful spending while public safety has eroded, collapsing whole communities and making victims out of our residents. We need more police, and we need to give them the resources needed to do their job and do it safely.”

A coalition of former mayors and council members joined ranks to oppose the proposition. While it appeared to increase city safety, experts advised that the proposed increase to the force would limit resources and crush the city budgets for anything other than cops.

"Budgeting for this level of hiring would not make the city safer, and it would spell doomsday for the city budget,” said Jaime Castro, president of the Dallas Police Association, at a public hearing. “Parks, streets, libraries and other city services improve our quality of life and contribute to a safer city."

The majority of the City Council openly opposed the proposition, and the loudest opponent was the pro-police-pension-funding Bazaldua.

“I think these HERO amendments are nothing more than political agendas,” Bazaldua said on Inside Texas Politics.

Yearly recruitment goals for 2025 have already been reduced from 400 to 325, and then even lower to 300, and interim police Chief Michael Igo said any higher recruitment rate is unrealistic.

"Moving the needle to 325 means me moving critical resources out of the patrol bureau with the thought of increased response times and increase in crime overall," he said.

In 2023, the city lowered its yearly police recruitment goal from 290 to 250. Eddie Garcia, the police chief then, described the original goal, which is lower than the city’s current bare minimum, as unrealistic.

Now, the city appears bound by law to meet the new police force requirement, and it likely needs a substantial economic boost to do that. In February, the city proposed redirecting $7.7 million, of a Biden-era $350 million grant, for police recruitment funding, but it's not nearly enough to hire at the rate voters who supported Proposition U demand. Another successful proposition Dallas HERO pushed allows residents to sue the City Council for violating the City Charter, and they have threatened to do so if the city doesn’t reach the 4,000 quota in a “timely manner.” Though the proposition intentionally omits a deadline, Dallas HERO has suggested a three to five-year timeline. According to police officials, hiring 325 officers would cost the city an extra $12 million.

Other U.S. cities, facing even worse economic conditions, have witnessed great success following the legalization of gambling. Biloxi, Mississippi, is one of them.

Biloxi, The Playground of the South

Biloxi is a quaint beach town straight out of a Southern Living picture book, complete with a lighthouse. The town of fewer than 50,000 residents will entertain 4.3 million people passing through, mainly at one of the Playground of the South’s eight resort-style casinos.

“[Gambling has] been great for the city of Biloxi,” Mayor Andrew “FoFo” Gilich said.

Biloxi opened its first casino in 1992 after the state allowed its constituents to vote on legalizing gambling. It started as dockside table games aboard large-wheeled paddleboats and now consists of an elaborate row of barges with massive casinos fit to entertain up to 7,000 guests total. A taxing formula was established when gaming was legalized, making Biloxi one of the only cities to receive a direct cut of the gambling tax revenue.

“[City funding] depends on how fair and creative the state gaming authorities set up the situation … Mississippi is very creative,” Gilich said.

In the Magnolia State, each casino is taxed 12% on its gross gaming revenue, 8% goes to the state’s general fund, and 4% is divided by Biloxi among public education, public safety and the city’s general fund.

“We were the fifth largest from a dollar standpoint, from a gross gaming revenue in, in the country,” said Gilich.

Since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in 2021, the annual total revenue between all eight casinos has been one billion dollars. This means the city is making $40 million from gambling alone, and of that, $8 million will go directly to public safety. Gambling revenue makes up 40% of the city’s $20 million total police budget.

When Mississippi legalized in-person sports betting in 2018, the same tax formula was adopted, and the city planned to hire six new police officers with an anticipated $1 million added to its budget.

Hesitation to legalize gambling is often tied to political parties and the trouble that gambling addiction can cause. Gambling opponents also note that the added revenue to city public safety efforts is often defeated by the possible increase in crime that casinos can introduce. Mayor Gilich insists Biloxi has remained safe. When asked if the crime rate went up following the legalization of casinos, he succinctly said: “Not for us.”

If Dallasites were hesitant to support casino gambling before, maybe this would win them over: Biloxi has been able to keep its property taxes stagnant for 28 years while also continuing to boost education and public safety.

“In Biloxi, you know, the casino part of the deal has been tremendous for us,” Gilich said.

Why Casinos May Not Be A Good Fit

Are the benefits of additional police officers canceled out by increased crime commonly associated with casinos? The answer isn’t cut and dry. A study by two economics professors at the University of Nevada analyzing national county-level crime data, excluding Nevada, found that there isn’t a direct causal relationship between crime and casinos.

“Our results show an increase in crime associated with casino expansion in some circumstances but decrease in others, with the results particularly contingent upon the crimes examined, whether the casino is a commercial casino or an Indian casino, and how long the casino has been open,” says the study.

The study found that crime can increase in the first few years of a casino opening but levels out within 12 years. The same study, however, found that legalized gambling has more significant long-term adverse effects in the cities and counties surrounding the host.

“A difference-in-differences model suggests that in the long term commercial casinos are associated with no significant change in crime in their host county, but crimes in surrounding adjacent counties do significantly increase.”

This could be bad news for Dallasites, as the land Adelson purchased in Irving has also been posed as a site for Texas’ first casino. The Las Vegas Sands Corp. submitted a zoning request to the city of Irving to approve a massive mixed-use development complete with a resort-style casino. The bright side for gambling opponents is that the casino element of the proposal was dropped ahead of a City Council vote because of community backlash.

Once gambling was removed from the equation, a future Adelson development passed in a 6-3 vote. That doesn't mean groundbreaking will happen anytime soon.

“I cannot commit to building a 4 million-square-foot project and spend $4 billion; the economics will not work without a casino piece,” Mark Boekenheide, a Sands Corp. executive, told Irving City Council members on March 21.

But Dallas HERO's executive director, Damien LeVeck, isn’t absolutely opposed to using tax revenue from gambling to fund the police as Proposition U mandates.

“If there’s a proposal on the table beyond the budget parameters outlined in Prop U that would allocate funds to DPD [and] their pension, we’d love to hear it. … Public safety should be the number one priority for any municipal government,” Leveck wrote in an email.

Dallas City Council member Cara Mendelsohn, meanwhile, dismissed gambling revenue as a means to fund city police.

“Given the limited results of the lottery to address education funding, I wouldn’t count on gambling to fund public safety,” she wrote in an email. “State leaders have said publicly that gambling will not move forward this session. Law enforcement is a core city function and should be paid by a steady, permanent funding source like property taxes.”

Aside from a linkage to an increase in crime and the unreliability of any future amendments being made to the Texas Constitution to allow betting, gambling is highly addictive. A 2024 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that those most susceptible to problem gambling are the poor.

“Gambling tax revenues, if a state makes the mistake of legalizing casinos or sports bookies, should be used to defray the many categories of costs to communities and public well-being that the gambling operators cause,” Russell F. Coleman, chairman of Texans Against Gambling wrote in an email. “The revenues, even at extremely high tax rates, don't cover those costs.”

A Global Casino Power Comes To Dallas

After 23 years of majority stake ownership, self-made billionaire entrepreneur and Preston Hollow resident Mark Cuban sold most of his shares in the Mavericks to the Adelson family for $3.5 billion in 2023. Before the Mavs franchise player Luka Doncic was shockingly traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, you could bet a lot of money on a Mavericks victory, and people did, just not in Texas. But when the Adelsons invested, Dallasites hoped home victories might eventually mean big payouts in new casinos too.

Before the acquisition of the Mavs, the Adelson name wasn’t on the tip of the tongue of the average Dallas resident, but Republican lawmakers knew of the gambling magnates. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson elevated themselves to the highest ranks of political notoriety through frequent million-dollar campaign donations, including a $100 million donation to a pro-Trump political action committee. Before he died in 2021, the conservative family patriarch was revered as a “kingmaker” for his heavy political sway backed by his thick wallet.

The Las Vegas Sands Corp., the casino conglomerate founded by Sheldon Adelson, is the third-largest casino company in the world in terms of revenue. After his death, his widow became chief executive officer of the family business. Now, city councils in Dallas and Irving have reviewed zoning laws as rumors emerge that Miriam Adelson is hoping to expand the chain to the Lone Star State and has the name of Texas’ most powerful names pre-written on check memo lines.

Ahead of the last legislative session in 2023, Adelson donated $3.3 million to Texas politicians and committees, including $1,000,000 directly to Gov. Greg Abbott. This year, she upped the ante and donated $13.7 million in the first 10 months of 2024, as The Dallas Morning News reported. This year, a Super PAC dedicated to the re-election of GOP Sen. Ted Cruz received another $1,000,000 donation.

The billionaire matriarch’s strong presence behind the curtain at the Legislature and in the city highlights a two-pronged issue about the status of legal bets: large-scale casinos versus online sports bets. Lawmakers are divided. Some support online sports betting while opposing resort casinos; others support both, and some don’t want to see any of it in Texas.

The conversation in Dallas primarily centers on the potential for a full-blown casino.

“Some casinos seem a little dingy and run down and seedy,” West said. “That's, in my mind, exactly what we don't want in our city. If you take a look at the facilities that are created by the Sands Corporation., those types of destination resorts where there's an opportunity to have concerts and conventions and activities that could supplement our downtown, to me, that's very attractive, and it's something we should welcome to our city and find a way to manage it properly, that obtained the benefits and effectively manage the problems.”

But Adelson’s purchase of the Mavs and prominence in gambling also illuminated ongoing nationwide progress toward legalizing sports betting.

For years, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) outlawed placing bets on sports, save for exceptions in Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Oregon. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal law, and the list of states with legal sports betting quickly grew. The call to put Texas on that list is strong.

Each state has its own rules around sports wagers and where you can place them. Retail wagers, placed in-person at licensed venues, are legal in 36 states, and entirely digitized online wagers are legal in 33. Whether you bet in person or online, the winnings are still taxed and sent to state and city governments.

Gambling Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Gambling and Texas have an on-again-off-again relationship; the activity and many similar “vices” were outlawed during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. But when the economy crashed hard and fast during the Great Depression, the state was desperate to generate tax revenue, and placing bets on horse racing was legalized in 1933. Four years later, the legislation was repealed. At the time, North Texas had the only two race tracks in the state. The region's progressive and accepting attitude toward betting has remained.

Betting never left the political mainstage, and in the ’60s, Red Berry, a prolific underground gambler from San Antonio, won a seat on the Texas House of Representatives on a pro-gambling platform. The rough-and-tumble politician, who was acquitted of murder three times, died before the state amended its Constitution to again allow parimutuel betting on horse races and established the Texas Racing Commission in 1987. After the lottery was established in 1991, gambling progress quieted. But gaming bills have been filed each session since at least 2009.

In 2023, House Joint Resolution 155, barely missed the two-thirds minimum required to clear the House by one vote. If it had passed voters would have been allowed to vote on a constitutional amendment establishing eight casinos in the state’s largest metropolitan areas and levied a 15% tax revenue, most of which would go to public education. It was the furthest a piece of gambling legislature had progressed, but still did not come close to legalization in Texas. It wasn’t taken up by the Senate, where Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has long been adamantly opposed to expanded gambling.

But the resolution failed before Adelson became a household name to North Texans and before she went all-in on the Legislature. This session, a slew of bills to bring gambling and sports betting to Texas were filed in both chambers.

State Rep. Charlie Geren, who backed HJR 155, has filed another house joint resolution to allow Texas voters to decide if gambling should be legalized this session. State Sen. Nathan Johnson from Dallas County filed a last-minute Senate joint resolution with the same intention. State Sen. Carol Alvarado has been consistently filing gaming legislation since 2009. This year, a new Senate joint resolution from the Houston senator would allow sports bets to be placed in person at casinos.

In the past, legalizing gambling has been a hard no. Patrick, leader of the Texas Senate, is one of the most outspoken voices against gambling and has clarified his stance that the state will never see a casino or sports betting so long as he is running the show. Patrick maintains that measures have limited support from the GOP senators.

“Texas is a red state,” Patrick wrote on X in 2023. “Yet the House vote on sports betting was carried by a Dem majority. The Texas Senate doesn’t pass bills with GOP in the minority. The GOP majority guides our path.”

Similarly, a dozen Republican members of the House expressed their confidence in the failure of gambling bills in a letter to the House State Affairs Committee chair. The letter was signed by North Texans: Rep. Mitch Little of Denton County, Rep. Keresa Richardson of Collin Couty and Rep. Katrina Pierson of Collin County.

“We are confident this legislation does not have the votes necessary to pass the Texas House this session,” the letter reads. “Given the certainty of its failure, I urge you not to waste valuable committee time on an issue that is dead on arrival.”

But gambling lobbyists don’t need to fold just yet, as support for gaming slowly grows.

In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the Texas Lottery Commission chairman advising the organization to abandon attempts to expand gambling in the state.

“State laws on gaming are to be viewed strictly as prohibitive to any expansion of gambling. This statutory framework is properly intentioned to protect our citizens, and I support it wholeheartedly,” Abbott wrote.

Since then, the governor has changed his tune. In the 10 years since Abbott has become more open to the future of gaming in Texas, he has become one of the primary recipients of Adelson’s donations.

"What I believe about online gaming, it would expand gaming in the state of Texas," Abbott said in a 2025 interview with Fox News. "It requires a constitutional amendment. What I'm in favor of is giving it to the voters and let the voters decide.”

In most states, gambling and the state lottery are overseen by the same association, but recent scandals for the Texas Lottery have significantly dampened support for any expansion. In the last two years, potentially fraudulent lottery payouts of over $80,000,000 have triggered state investigations into the Texas Lottery Commission.

“The Lottery Commission mess is likely the final nail in the coffin for gambling legislation in 2025,” Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, told The Dallas Morning News. “It raises serious concerns about the ability of the state to regulate the far more lucrative industries of casino gambling and online sports betting.”

Former Gov. Rick Perry has also come around to the idea of expanded betting and even appeared in a commercial for the Sports Betting Alliance. Perry is also a beneficiary of Adelson’s mega donations and echoes a common sentiment among Republican politicians who have warmed up to the idea: Betting happens anyway, so Texas might as well make some money from it.

“I’m not in favor of expansion of gambling,” Perry said in a telephone interview with The Dallas Morning News. “If someone stands up and says, ‘This is an expansion of gambling,’ that is an erroneous statement. It’s not. This is a regulation of something that’s going on, and it’s not going to go away.”

Texas is surrounded on almost all sides by states with legalized casino gambling and sports betting, and the massive Winstar Casino in Oklahoma is less than an hour from Dallasites. Bettors in Houston can catch a destination-less cruise off the coast of Galveston and gamble their hearts out on international waters. New Mexico has casinos too. Texans are spending their money on gambling; the state just isn’t reaping any of the benefits.

“Dallas taking a position of ‘no casinos whatsoever’ is not going to stop [betting] from occurring,” West said.

Gambling Could Be a Saving Grace for Dallas Police

The state has used gambling to claw itself out of economic hardship before, and the potential revenue is hard to ignore. While critics say legalizing the vice is a one-way ticket to hell, and there is a risk of more crime and addiction, there have been undeniable successes for gambling in many cities. For Dallas, that could easily mean finally escaping the pension hole, avoiding quota-inspired lawsuits from Dallas HERO, and keeping the city safe. John Miller, who was appointed as the chief of the Biloxi Police Department in 2009 after 19 years on the force, started as a patrolman in the city before the casinos moved in.

“It took several years before we really felt any type of change in crime,” Miller said to Global Gaming Business Magazine. “And I don’t think we ever felt it because we’d already prepared for it. We had hired more patrolmen, bought better equipment, and we kind of absorbed it. We never had that really big crime wave, the big boom that some people thought. Instead, what we ended up with was better law enforcement.”