Under the contract, Intralot is entitled to receive 50 percent of Internet sales; the company receives only 2.6 percent of other lottery sales.
Joseph Giddis, Gandhi’s contracting director, said he did not consider the addition of Internet gambling a “material change to the contract” requiring re-submission to the council.
That answer was ridiculed by David A. Catania (I-At Large), a frequent critic of Gandhi. “There’s no way in my mind that that explanation is sustainable,” he said. He went on to call for the resignations of finance officials involved in the process, “right up to the top.”
“I was robbed of the right to make a choice, informed or otherwise,” Catania told Gandhi. “It is not your right to substitute your judgment for mine.”
Representatives of groups that competed with Intralot said they had not contemplated including an Internet gambling component in their bids.
Darryl Wiggins, owner of a District document-management company that partnered with Rhode Island-based GTECH on a bid, said iGaming was never discussed as an option. “Nobody ever asked me about any Internet gambling. Nobody ever asked us to demonstrate it. It was never brought up as a topic,” he said.
Charles Hopkins, a Maryland businessman who partnered with Atlanta-based Scientific Games, said it never occurred to him to read “non-traditional games” as including Internet gambling. “For one thing, it was illegal at the time in the District,” he said. “We would have been bidding on something that was illegal.”
Hopkins said he agreed with Willoughby that any Internet gambling program should undergo a new round of bidding. “I absolutely believe it would be a better deal for the city if it were rebid,” he said.
Gandhi said Thursday his office would not proceed with the Internet gambling plan until he receives “clear guidance from the council and the mayor.”
Evans, chair of the Finance and Revenue Committee, said Thursday afternoon he had not decided whether to proceed with a repeal bill offered by Wells and Phil Mendelson (D-At Large).
But he agreed the new contract details were troubling. “There is no way that we would have known [in 2009] we were voting on Internet gambling,” he said. “It’s akin to building a baseball stadium without telling anybody.”
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