A Republican legislator is threatening to pull his support for a sports betting bill over growing frustrations with how Gov. Tim Walz has been handling the rollout of commercial sales of marijuana.
On Wednesday, Rep. Nolan West blasted Walz over media reports that his administration was nearing completion of a compact with tribal governments that would allow them “major access” to license businesses to open off-reservation recreational cannabis shops.
The fifth-term lawmaker from Blaine said the compact negotiations, first reported by MinnPost, would provide an “insurmountable competitive advantage” to tribes in getting marijuana shops to market over non-tribal entrepreneurs who have been “strung along waiting for a chance to compete.”
In 2023, West was one of two Republican legislators who joined Democrats in passing a bill to legalize recreational cannabis. He’s also been a vocal proponent of a sports betting bill that has been gaining momentum in recent legislative sessions but has yet to attract enough votes to pass in the House or Senate.
“Yesterday, news broke that the Walz-Flanagan administration is giving the tribes a pseudo-monopoly on Minnesota’s cannabis market, jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into our state,” West said. “If this is how the administration is going to function in negotiations, I am discontinuing my efforts to legalize sports betting in our state.”
West’s statement came on the heels of comments that Walz’s latest cannabis czar provided to legislators in a House Commerce Committee meeting on Tuesday.
“I can’t comment on specifics of the compacts but I think Minnesota will look different than a lot of states in terms of the role tribal nations will play in our market,” Eric Taubel, acting director for OCM, told legislators in the Feb. 11 hearing.
West, who sits on the House Commerce Committee, has criticized other components of OCM’s slow rollout of a commercial cannabis sales licensing system, including in November when a judge issued a stay on the cannabis “social-equity” lottery that was to be held for those looking to open marijuana businesses.
“This cannabis rollout is going exactly how horribly I expected,” West said in a social media post at the time. “The problems were plain to see when the bill was getting put together, but the authors ignored them.”
One Democrat legislator in the House Commerce Committee didn’t seem as concerned as West about any competitive advantages that the OCM may be providing for tribes.
“If you end up with a model that gives a big advantage to tribal nations and micro businesses, that pretty much fits right in with what we were trying to do in the beginning, so that’s actually kind of encouraging,” said Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids, who authored the recreational cannabis bill in 2023.
Hank Long
Hank Long is a journalism and communications professional whose writing career includes coverage of the Minnesota legislature, city and county governments and the commercial real estate industry. Hank received his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, and his law degree at the University of St. Thomas. The Minnesota native lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and four children. His dream is to be around when the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
