The <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/story/1207533.html">Miami Herald</a> is reporting that the Seminole Tribe approved a compact deal on Friday with Gov. Charlie Crist, and Crist has said details of the deal will be announced on Monday.
The Herald says the tribe rejected some last-minute suggestions from legislative leaders, including one that would allow for the possible future expansion of gambling in Palm Beach County and in North Florida, where the tribe has no land.
Crist is expected to sign the compact on Monday and call for an early October special session of the Legislature to ratify it. How amenable the Legislature will be to a compact that’s different from what it passed in May will hinge on how different it is. In reports on the negotiations, no pieces of the compact that dealt with poker were in dispute, but the tribe sought to keep table games at Seminole Casino Immokalee and tighten up exclusivity details, which are necessary under federal regulations if the state wants to receive payments from the tribe.
If passed by the Legislature, the compact would go to the federal government for review and, if approved, new poker limits will take effect as soon as the compact is published in the Federal Register. Those two steps took about six weeks with the last compact.
