Second round brings 15 bids for electronic gambling monitoring system in Montana

Sunday, Feb. 6, 2000 | 9:40 a.m.

Friday was the deadline for companies to inform the state Gambling Control Division of the state Justice Department whether they planned to bid by the Feb. 25 deadline on designing and installing the $2.4 million system.

This was the second bidding opportunity. Only one first-round bid came in last November, and Division Administrator Jim Oppedahl rejected it and re-opened bidding in February. He said the November bid from Tetragenics Co. of Butte, a subsidiary of Montana Power Co., was incomplete and lacked the detail needed by the state when it solicited proposals last August. Tetragenics is one of the companies planning to bid this month.

"I'm surprised," Oppedahl said, wondering why more of the companies didn't submit proposals earlier. He said he was pleased that the revised process drew so many more proposals.

The other Montana companies that said they intend to bid were A&G Electric and Construction of Whitehall, MSE Technology Applications of Butte, and Wyle Systems of Bozeman.

The out-of-state companies were Mikohn Gaming Corp. of Las Vegas; Lodging and Gaming Systems of Reno, Nev.; Paradigm Gaming Systems of Las Vegas; Gaming System International of Las Vegas; Multiple Application Tracking Systems of Golden, Colo.; EchoPort Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M..

Also, Vectura Technology Integrators Inc. of Concord, Ca.; Cash Control Accounting Systems of Sacramento, Calif.; Unisys Corp., of Mission Viejo, Calif.; International Gaming Technology of Las Vegas; and USL Financials of Vienna, Va.

The 1999 Legislature authorized the state to create a computer network that will use telephone lines and computer modems to monitor the amount of money played in the gambling machines daily to assure that the right amount of taxes is paid.

Under Montana law, taxes are based on the total amount of money played in the machines, minus the winnings. Taxes take 15 percent of the difference, with two-thirds going to local governments and one-third to the state.

For the system to take effect, however, owners of at least 10,000 machines - 70 percent of the total operating poker and keno machines in Montana - must agree to participate. That provision made the proposal acceptable to all of the elements of the gambling industry, unlike previous bills that made the so-called dialup system mandatory.

Last year, the gambling machines had gross income of $253.5 million.

Attorney General Joe Mazurek and Gov. Marc Racicot, a former attorney general, had pushed for a similar system in 1995 and 1997 before succeeding in passing the measure in 1999. The 1999 law, unlike previous attempts, made the system voluntary.

Mazurek and Racicot pushed for the electronic monitoring system to replace the current manual accounting system in which rolls of adding machine tape inside the machine are used to keep track of the finances. A legislative audit in 1994 concluded that state officials could not determine whether machine owners were underpaying or overpaying taxes on the machines because of the possibility of mistakes either way.