By Miles Flynn | Southern Indiana Business Report
FRENCH LICK — French Lick Casino’s fiscal year-end numbers, released July 12, reveal that while the property is still making progress after the COVID shutdown and its long phased-in reopening, revenue continues to lag pre-pandemic benchmarks.
The casino’s taxable adjusted gross revenue for the month was reported at $6,457,217. The figure is down $79,550, or 1%, from May. AGR is up $3,831,978, or 146%, from June 2020. (The property was closed for the first half of June 2020 due to the pandemic shutdown.) However, comparing June 2021 to pre-COVID June 2019 shows the casino is down $1,768,483, or 21%, for the period.
French Lick’s AGR total for the fiscal year came in at $64,046,568. That figure is up $1,392,192, or 2%, from last fiscal year. Again, though, it’s down significantly from the previous year, missing the mark by $26,054,526, or 29%.
The statewide story for the 13 Hoosier casinos is similar but not as severe. The combined AGR total for June came in at $198,735,134. The figure is down $13,508,766, or 6%, from May. While it’s up $99,830,449, or 101%, from abbreviated June 2020, it’s down $23,813,019, or 14%, from June 2019.
The statewide AGR total for the fiscal year, $1,987,448,631, is up $430,249,305, or 28%, from last fiscal year, but it’s down $77,542,101, or 4%, from the previous year.
Turning to taxes, the local casino paid $968,583 in wagering tax and $61,087 in sports wagering tax for June, bringing the monthly total tax to $1,029,670. Total tax for the year amounted to $6,509,039.
The year-end tax total is down considerably from last fiscal year and the previous fiscal year due to casino tax rates’ progressive structure by month, based on thresholds in year-to-date revenue totals, and also how the base tax rate starts at an even lower percentage in cases of extreme underperformance. As a result, French Lick spent the first five months of this fiscal year paying a wagering tax rate of only 2.5% and ended the last two months of the fiscal year paying at a rate of 15%. In normal years, the property would start out at the 15% rate and graduate to a rate of 25% or even 30% by the end of the year, depending on performance. Thus, total tax collections at French Lick for this fiscal year amounted to just $6,509,039. Totals for last fiscal year and the previous fiscal year, respectively, were $12,251,014 and $19,530,330.
Statewide taxes for June amounted to $64,787,488 in wagering tax, $2,419,156 in sports wagering tax and $4,336,239 in the supplemental wagering tax collected at 11 properties for a total of $71,542,883. Total taxes for the year came in at $582,841,448, which is better than last fiscal year’s total of $426,028,814 and quite close to the previous year’s total of $590,755,199.