Virginians bet $638.8 million on sports in November 2023, up 23.1% from November 2022, according to data the Virginia Lottery released on Dec. 29, 2023.
November’s handle is an 11.8% increase from October 2023, when Virginians bet $571 million on sports. Virginia betters won $595.8 million in November and about $507 million in October.
About $632 million of November’s sports gaming revenues came from mobile operators, and the remaining more than $6.59 million came from casino retail activity. Virginia’s current casinos are the temporary Bristol Casino: The Future Home of Hard Rock, the permanent Rivers Casino Portsmouth and the temporary Caesars Virginia casino in Danville. Virginia’s gaming revenues from casinos in November totaled $51.2 million, according to the Virginia Lottery.
The licensed operators included in November’s reporting were:
Betfair Interactive US (FanDuel) in partnership with the Washington Commanders,
Virginia places a 15% tax on sports betting activity based on each permit holder’s adjusted gross revenue. With 10 operators reporting net positive AGR for November, the month’s taxes totaled $5.48 million, of which 97.5% (about $5.3 million) will be deposited in the state’s general fund. The remainder, about $137,000, will be deposited in the Problem Gambling Treatment and Support Fund, which the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services administers.
For about a decade leading up to 2013, Dr. James Min was one of three physician-owners of a private practice in Prince William County, Bristow Run Family Medicine, working as a doctor by day and a finance manager by night.
“With the complexity of health care, billing, contracting with insurances, all these kinds of things, it became a lot of work as a physician,” he says. “You’re seeing patients during the day, and then you have to run the business at night. … It just kind of wears you down and gets very tiring.”
In addition to practicing medicine and keeping up with medical advances, Min handled financial duties for the practice, including payroll and billing, which meant he had to keep up with changes in Medicare billing regulations, follow up on denied insurance claims and evaluate employee benefits. Another partner handled the bulk of human resources, and the third oversaw IT.
In 2013, Min decided to join Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based health system Novant Health, which opened a Haymarket office for its Bull Run Family Medicine practice with him as its sole physician initially. Min sold his shares in the Bristow Run practice to his business partners.
“I decided that I wanted to just work and see patients, and it was OK for me to give up some of that autonomy but to have someone do the billing and HR and things like that,” he explains.
Min’s former Bristow Run Family Medicine partners also later joined Novant Health as a different family practice.
In January 2016, Novant formed a joint venture with the University of Virginia Health System for its Virginia operations, and in July 2021, UVA Health assumed full ownership of the system. Min is the medical group physician market executive for what is now UVA Community Health and continues to practice in Bull Run Family Medicine’s Haymarket office.
His story isn’t unique. In Virginia and nationally, the number of doctors in independent practices continues to shrink as physicians sell their practices, joining health systems, or retire in the face of ongoing and mounting challenges that are contributing to consolidation in health care.
In 2012, 60.1% of physicians worked in private practices, while 23.4% worked in practices at least partially owned by a hospital or health system, according to data from the American Medical Association’s Physician Practice Benchmark Survey. In 2022, however, only 46.7% of physician respondents worked in private practices, while 31.3% worked in practices at least partially owned by a hospital or health system.
Private practice benefits
Some physicians in private practices argue that they can provide better care because of their autonomy to make care decisions and the personal touch they provide, but there is also a measurable difference in patient costs between independent practices and health systems. A study of 580 health systems from Harvard University researchers and the National Bureau of Economic Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2023 found that physician services delivered within health systems cost between 12% and 26% more than in independent practices.
Multiple factors contribute to that difference, but a major one is the difference in site-of-service fees associated with procedures like colonoscopies, explains Dr. Paul Berggreen, board chair and president of the recently formed Washington, D.C.-based American Independent Medical Practice Association. Medicare and many commercial insurers provide larger reimbursements for procedures’ facility fees to hospitals than to independently operated care centers.
“We want people to understand that we deliver high-quality care and … that independence and that segment of care delivery in this health care system needs to be maintained,” Berggreen says. “It’s good competition for the system.”
Doctors in private practices stress their autonomy in choices about patient care, like being able to spend more time with patients, as a major factor in their preferences for private practice.
Dr. Dan Moore started his practice, Henrico County-based RevMed, in 2021 after working at an urgent and primary care center owned by a chain, where he was pressured to see patients faster, he says.
In a typical urgent and primary care practice, “your job becomes how to generate [insurance] codes as fast as you possibly can,” Moore says, “because the amount of time I spend with a patient is irrelevant when it comes to compensation. … You essentially squeeze more and more productivity out of providers in a typical practice.”
Also, private practitioners feel that developing ongoing relationships with patients contributes to the quality of care they provide.
“When my [patients] call me, they don’t get whoever’s on call that day,” Moore says. “With me, my [patients] call me, they get me.”
Dr. Sandy Chung, CEO of Fairfax-based pediatric practice group Trusted Doctors and immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says, “I think the hard part is as groups get bigger, what you lose is some of that personal touch that is so nice in a smaller practice.” However, patients might prefer the “sameness” of each visit or service at a large health system or practice, she points out.
Negotiating power
Cited as the largest obstacle to small physician-owned practices remaining private are low Medicare and commercial health insurance reimbursement rates. Medicare physician reimbursement rates have not kept up with the rate of inflation.
From 2001 to 2023, the cost of running a medical practice increased 47%, according to Medicare Economic Index data, but Medicare physician pay has only increased about 9%. Adjusted for inflation in practice costs, Medicare physician pay declined 26% from 2001 to 2023, according to the American Medical Association.
Dr. Dan Moore started his Henrico County-based medical practice, RevMed, to have greater autonomy over patient visits and care. Photo by Caroline Martin
Medicare physician payment rates for 2024 will be 1.25% less than 2023 rates, although the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are creating an add-on payment for outpatient and office visits for primary care and longitudinal care.
Reductions in Medicare payments affect independent physicians differently from hospital-employed doctors, Berggreen says.
“If we collect a dollar, we pay our overhead on that dollar and we take the rest home as what we get out of our salary,” he says, while hospital-employed physicians are largely unaffected, since their pay doesn’t hinge on how much Medicaid reimburses.
On the private insurance side, health systems are able to negotiate reimbursement rates with insurance companies directly, leveraging their size for higher payments. Private practices with a handful of physicians, however, don’t have the leverage to bring insurers to the bargaining table, meaning they must accept the contracts they’re offered if they want to continue accepting patients covered by those insurers.
“You try to contact an insurance company and ask about contracts, and if you’re just a three-doctor office, they don’t even sniff at you,” Min says.
In light of this, some physicians, like Moore, choose not to accept insurance. “It allows me to have independence and sort of get back to basics as far as how to design my practice,” he says.
Instead, RevMed operates on a membership model. Patients pay a monthly membership fee and don’t incur other charges, with a few exceptions like house call payments.
Other private practices have banded together to negotiate with insurance as a bloc. Take for example the Shenandoah Independent Practice Association, a group of more than 300 physicians in the larger Winchester area. Members pay dues for three years, which vest into a voting membership in the third year.
“We have the ability to negotiate [as] a collective group, and 300 physicians is no small deal,” says SIPA Executive Director
V. Allen Santos. Physician members are then able to opt in or out of the contracts SIPA negotiates.
At this point, Santos says, SIPA’s primary responsibility is getting the best possible deal on insurance contracts, but the organization’s structure allows him to seek other contracts for the group if requested, such as finding a groupwide electronic medical record vendor or hazardous waste disposal contractor.
Back-office help
Value-based care insurance programs require additional infrastructure that small practices can’t always afford, Trusted Doctors CEO Dr. Sandy Chung explains. Photo by Stephen Gosling
Gaining help or having someone else entirely handle the business side of running a medical practice is another reason physicians join health systems.
Along with submitting claims to insurance and related tasks like providing prior authorizations for some prescriptions, physician practice owners have to navigate and stay abreast of patient billing, federal information technology and cybersecurity regulations, new Medicare billing regulations and other changes in health care law.
“The challenge is, when you have one or two clinicians, maybe one or two other staff, that’s your whole practice, and the ability to keep up with the laws, the changing rules, the IT requirements, all of those things, is really challenging,” Chung says.
Also on the rise are value-based care insurance programs, which provide a flat payment per patient, rather than per service, and often offer health care providers incentives for meeting quality metrics, which vary by program but can include hospital admission rates and number of cancer screenings. Some also offer profit sharing with providers.
“In order to do this kind of work, you have to have an infrastructure,” like employees who check on patients’ management of complicated medical conditions, Chung says. “For a small practice, it can’t afford to hire staff to do that, and you barely can get through the day seeing the patients that you need to see, much less have the bandwidth to be able to succeed in value-based care.”
Major health systems, though, generally have designated staff to monitor quality care metrics.
Another possible path that allows practitioners to stay independent in their clinical practices is joining a management services organization, or MSO — essentially a business office — often owned by a private equity firm, effectively outsourcing their back-office operations.
“The reason that practices have done that … is that we need access to capital to grow our practices, to improve our practices, to invest in the technologies and the manpower and the infrastructure that we need to compete,” Berggreen says.
Medical practice Mid-Atlantic Women’s Care, which has about 85 OB-GYNs across 37 locations, including some in Virginia, affiliated with management services organization Unified Women’s Healthcare in 2022, says Dr. Hugh Dixon Wolcott, who retired from clinical practice with Mid-Atlantic Women’s Care at the end of 2022 and is a consultant with Unified Women’s Healthcare.
Health system-affiliated hospitals have “tremendous amount[s] of resources” like data analytics, Wolcott says. “In order to basically try to have a level playing field, we need to have available those same types of resources,” like the ability to track quality metrics and offer simulation training. MSOs provide those resources, he says.
Unified Women’s Healthcare uses a fee structure, Wolcott says. Some MSOs, though, buy the physical assets of practices, like offices and equipment, and lease them back to doctors.
MSOs also take administrative tasks off doctors’ plates, like IT, billing and human resources, and can help provide scalability for costs like medical supplies.
For Min, the tradeoffs to join a larger system have worked out. Although working for a health system means he has less say over high-level decisions, he has a significant voice in the UVA Community Health subsidiary system and appreciates having a human resources department to help with hiring paperwork and others handling billing.
Tysons-based tech company MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries continued to grow their cryptocurrency cache in December, nearing $8 billion in bitcoin holdings.
The company and its subsidiaries purchased about $615.7 million worth of bitcoin — approximately 14,620 coins — in cash from Nov. 30 to Dec. 26, according to MicroStrategy’s Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held about 189,150 bitcoins as of Dec. 26, which it purchased for about more than $5.89 billion total. The average purchase price per bitcoin was approximately $31,168, including fees and expenses. As of 12:47 p.m. Friday, bitcoins were selling for $41,719.61 per unit, valuing MicroStrategy’s total bitcoin holdings at about $7.89 billion. That’s a drop from Thursday’s closing price of $42,614.65 per unit.
Also included in the SEC filing, as of Dec. 26, MicroStrategy received approximately $610.1 million in net proceeds from selling more than 1.07 million class A common shares through its sale agreement with Cowen and Co., Canaccord Genuity and BTIG, a deal it agreed to Nov. 30. As of 12:55 p.m. Friday, shares were trading for $619.25, down from Thursday’s closing price of $667.88 per share.
MicroStrategy announced its first bitcoin purchase in August 2020, saying it had converted $250 million from its cash holdings to more than 21,000 bitcoins, making it one of the first public companies to convert its cash treasury reserves into cryptocurrency as a store of value.
MicroStrategy founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who stepped down as CEO after the company’s August 2022 earnings report, is currently facing a lawsuit from Washington, D.C., alleging he defrauded the city of more than $25 million in income taxes. Although in March a D.C. Superior Court judge dismissed part of the lawsuit that could have netted D.C. up to $150 million, the city can proceed with the part of the lawsuit seeking $25 million.
A halal meat business, 5 Pillar Meats, will invest more than $1.7 million to build an abattoir and red meat processing facility in Prince Edward County, a project expected to create 12 jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Thursday.
The new building, which will be located on a 3-acre site in the Prince Edward County Business Park in Farmville, will be nearly 3,000 square feet. It will provide processing services for Southside Virginia livestock producers, focusing on beef, lamb and goats.
The Prince Edward-based 5 Pillar Meats is an extension of Green Bay-based Abdus-Sabur Farms, which has produced livestock and vegetables since 1982, according to 5 Pillar Meats Chief Operations Officer Sekou Abdus-Sabur. This project will be the company’s first meat processing facility.
5 Pillar Meats will have two sources of meats: animals harvested in the facility and meat purchased from a local wholesale distributor, Abdus-Sabur said in a statement. Animals harvested will be halal, meaning prepared in a way that is sanctioned by Islamic law, unless a customer specifically asks that the meat not be halal.
The company, which will source its livestock from Virginia farms, will offer wholesale and retail cuts processing to restaurants, hotels, grocers and retail consumers, especially those seeking halal meats. The company will also sell fresh cut meats at its small on-site retail store.
“We are happy to have the opportunity to offer this service to small and large producers alike who have had limited access to USDA-inspected processing of their livestock. Now, both will be able to market to the public,” 5 Pillar Meats CEO Qadir Abdus-Sabur said in a statement. “Families, local restaurants, hotels and others can enjoy locally raised, harvested and processed meat/meat products. We look forward to serving our community.”
The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services worked with the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, Prince Edward County and the county’s Industrial Development Authority to secure the project. Youngkin approved a $50,000 grant from the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund, which the county will match locally. The Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission is granting the project $75,000.
“I thank 5 Pillar Meats for their investment in Farmville and in Southside Virginia livestock producers,” Youngkin said in a statement. “This is the type of project that the AFID grant program was designed for as it creates rural jobs, encourages economic development and promotes agriculture, Virginia’s largest private industry.”
Goat milk products maker Bates Family Farm will invest roughly $1 million to relocate its manufacturing facility to a Russell County-owned building in Lebanon, a project expected to create 12 jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Wednesday.
“We’re creating agriculture-based jobs and selling Virginia-made products,” Bates Family Farm co-founder and CEO Joseph “Joe” Bates said. The jobs encompass multiple skills, he said, with most employees moving between the processing and farm sides depending on the season.
The Russell County-based manufacturer will move its skin care products manufacturing from a roughly 4,000-square-foot building on the farm to the 40,000-square-foot former Acme grocery store building, according to Bates. Bates Family Farm will then convert its current manufacturing building into a creamery to expand its dairy operation within a year to 18 months, he said, producing bottled goat milk and cheeses.
“What’s happened is our herd has grown over the years,” Bates said. “We’ve gone from basically 30 goats to about 200 goats at the moment, and of course, we’re getting a lot more milk, so now, our sales can’t keep up with our milk production,” which prompted the expansion.
Over the next three years, the company expects to increase production to $2 million worth of agricultural product (the value of the milk, not the finished products).
Shannon and Joe Bates established the company in Lee County in 2013 and later moved it to Russell County. Bates Family Farm’s skin care products include soap, lotion, lip balm and body cream and are sold in more than 1,000 retail and specialty stores across the U.S. The company offers 26 scents, Joe Bates said.
The Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority provided the Russell County Industrial Development Authority with three loans for the purchase and renovation of the former Acme building in Lebanon: up to $500,000 in July 2021, up to $200,000 in February 2022 and up to $250,000 in March.
The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services worked with Russell County and the Russell County Industrial Development Authority to secure the project. Youngkin approved a $70,000 grant from the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development (AFID) Fund, which Russell County will match locally.
“I am pleased to see this AFID award assist in the relocation and expansion of Bates Family Farm, a Virginia home-grown, agricultural business, founded by one of our country’s veterans,” Youngkin said in a statement. “This project increases economic development activity in Russell County, provides new jobs in a rural area and demonstrates our support of the commonwealth’s dairy industry and to Virginia’s entire agricultural community.”
Sixteen Virginia companies received the top score in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2023-2024 Corporate Equality Index, released in November.
Nationally, more than 1,384 companies, including 378 Fortune 500 companies, participated in the organization’s 21st Corporate Equality Index (CEI) survey. Companies that do not participate in the survey but are listed in the CEI are ranked using independent research. The CEI measures corporate policies, practices and benefits for LGBTQ+ inclusivity.
This year, 545 companies earned all 100 points, receiving the foundation’s 2023 Equality 100 Award: Leaders in LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion. The award is a rebrand from HRC’s “Best Places to Work” award.
Clustered in the northern and central parts of the state, the following Virginia companies received the Equality 100 Award:
Airbus Americas, Herndon
Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC), Arlington
Altria Group, Henrico County
AvalonBay Communities, Arlington
Boeing, Arlington
Capital One Financial, McLean
CGI, Fairfax
Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac), McLean
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Richmond
Gannett, McLean
Hilton Worldwide Holdings, McLean
Nestlé USA, Arlington
Northrop Grumman, Falls Church
Parsons, Chantilly
Williams Mullen, Richmond
Willis Towers Watson (WTW), Arlington
“The future workforce is more out and allied than ever before in our nation’s history, and this year’s CEI shows a business community looking for ways to further support LGBTQ+ workers and their families,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.
The CEI survey has four assessment categories: workforce protections, like written employment nondiscrimination policies that include sexual orientation and gender identity; inclusive benefits, like parity between benefits for employees’ spouses and partners; supporting an inclusive culture, which requires employers to have at least four types of organizational competency programs, including one about intersectionality in the workplace, to earn full credit; and corporate social responsibility, like philanthropic contributions and LGBTQ+ supplier diversity programs.
Washington, D.C.-based HRC was established in 1980 and is an LGBTQ+ advocacy and political lobbying organization.
DXC Technology has replaced its chairman, president and CEO, Mike Salvino, with interim President and CEO Raul Fernandez, the Ashburn-based Fortune 500 IT company announced Wednesday.
Salvino had served as president and CEO since 2019 and as chairman since 2022. He will transition from his role as chairman effective immediately, and remain in an advisory role until March 31, 2024, “in mutual agreement with the board,” according to a news release.
Fernandez, who has been a member of DXC’s board of directors since 2020, is vice chairman and co-owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the NHL Washington Capitals team and the NBA’s Washington Wizards. The two teams are planning to move from Washington, D.C., to Alexandria in a $2 billion deal announced earlier this month. He also has served as CEO and founder of Proxicom and CEO of Dimension Data North America and ObjectVideo. Fernandez is also a director of Broadcom, an alternative governor for the NBA Board of Governors, a special adviser to Carrick Capital Partners and a member of Volition Capital’s strategic advisory board.
David Herzog, DXC’s lead independent director, has been named chairman of the board, which will conduct a search for a permanent CEO. Herzog has served on the board since 2017. He most recently served as chief financial officer and executive vice president of American Internal Group. Herzog is on the board of directors for MetLife and chairperson of its audit committee.
“It has been a privilege to serve as CEO for the last four years as we undertook a significant transformation journey at DXC,” Salvino said in a statement. “We achieved our goal of bringing stability to the business by cementing our financial foundation and assembling the right senior management team needed to drive better performance and deliver on the company’s strategic objectives moving forward. Raul and David are perfect leaders to oversee DXC into its next phase.”
Salvino was Virginia’s highest paid CEO in 2021, with a total pay of $28.7 million, a 32% raise from 2020. In 2022, he was the seventh highest paid CEO in Virginia, with a total compensation of $20.3 million.
In fiscal year 2023, DXC posted $14.4 billion in revenue, down from approximately $16.26 billion in FY22, which was an 8.26% decrease from its FY21 revenue of $17.73 billion. In 2020, DXC posted $19.57 billion in revenue.
Also in March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission penalized the company for making “misleading” financial reports from 2018 to early 2020. DXC did not admit to or deny the charges but consented to a cease-and-desist order and agreed to pay an $8 million penalty.
Almost all Virginia hotel markets have fully recovered financially from the COVID-19 pandemic, and Hampton Roads continues to outpace Virginia and the U.S. in improvement based on hotel revenue.
Virginia hotel revenues through November were 12.7% higher than they were in 2019, according to a report released Tuesday by Old Dominion University’s Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy, although Northern Virginia still lags.
Dragas Center economists analyzed data from STR, a division of CoStar Group that provides market data on the U.S. hospitality industry, for the report.
The number of rooms sold in Virginia was 1.6% lower in November than it was from January through November 2019. The average daily rate (ADR) for hotel rooms through November was $131, up 14.6% from 2019. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) was up 11.1% from 2019, at $82.
The state’s three largest markets — Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and Richmond — accounted for about 77% of Virginia hotels’ revenue. In Hampton Roads, hotel revenues are 22.3% higher than they were from year-to-date 2019 levels, and Richmond hotel revenues rose 17.4%. But, in Northern Virginia, where work-related travel continues to stall, hotel revenue was down 2.5% from the same period in 2019.
In Northern Virginia, “we’re still not seeing the recovery in the corporate individual travel that we’d like to see, but most of the other segments continue to perform pretty well,” said Eric Terry, president of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association.
College towns led the way in revenue increases through November. In the Charlottesville market, hotel revenues increased 29.5% from 2019 levels, while in Blacksburg, revenues rose 27.8%. The Staunton/Harrisonburg area had a 26.1% increase over 2019 levels. Football, basketball and other fall sports are likely contributing to the rising hotel revenues, Terry said.
Within Hampton Roads, the Virginia Beach submarket had the largest revenue increase from 2019: 28.8%. Chesapeake/Suffolk followed, with an increase of 26.3%, and Norfolk/Portsmouth were close behind with a 26% increase in revenue from 2019. The Williamsburg market had the slowest revenue growth in the area, at 8.5%.
Rooms sold through November decreased 10.6% from 2019 levels in Northern Virginia, 8% in the Roanoke market and 5.5% in the Virginia portion of the Bristol/Kingsport, Tennessee, market.
Within Hampton Roads, rooms sold in the Norfolk/Portsmouth submarket increased 5.8% from the same period in 2019. Rooms sold in Virginia Beach increased 3.8%, and the Chesapeake/Suffolk submarket had a 1.9% increase in rooms sold. In the Williamsburg and Newport News/Hampton submarkets, however, rooms sold declined 4.3% and 2.7%, respectively.
“With continued increase in leisure travel and a recovery in group travel, we have seen significant improvement in the performance of the hotel industry over the 2019 levels,” Vinod Agarwal, deputy director of ODU’s Dragas Center, said in a statement. “Substantial increases in hotel revenue in almost all markets, however, can be easily attributed to higher room rates rather than increases in occupancy or increases in hotel rooms sold.”
In October, Virginia hotel revenues were up 12.6% compared with 2019 levels, and Hampton Roads revenues were up 22.8%. The federal per diem reimbursement rate increase that went into effect Oct. 1 has contributed to the revenue increases of the past two months, Terry said.
Compared to year-to-date 2022 numbers, Virginia’s hotel revenue through November was up 9.5%, and rooms sold were up 0.8%. Northern Virginia’s hotel revenues through November were up 18.5% from the same period last year, while Hampton Roads saw a 3% revenue increase. The Richmond market had a 5.3% increase in revenue from 2022 levels.
Parsons won a classified federal contract valued at more than $250 million, the Chantilly-based Fortune 1000 defense contractor announced Tuesday.
“This award represents a critical task that the corporation and its acquired companies have been performing for over a decade,” according to a Parsons news release. The contract has a base period of one year with four one-year options.
Founded in 1944, Parsons provides technology solutions in the defense, intelligence and critical infrastructure markets. It posted $4.2 billion in 2022 revenue and has more than 17,000 employees worldwide. Between Aug. 2 and Oct. 3, the company moved its headquarters within Fairfax County, from Centreville to Chantilly, according to addresses listed in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Gaming revenues from Virginia’s three casinos totaled $51.2 million in November, according to Virginia Lottery data released Friday.
Virginia’s first casino, the Bristol Casino: Future Home of Hard Rock temporary facility, opened July 2022. The Virginia Lottery Board approved HR Bristol’s casino license in April 2022. The Bristol casino reported a little more than $12 million in adjusted gaming revenue (wagers minus winnings) in November, of which about $10 million came from its 908 slots, and $1.9 million from its 29 table games.
Rivers Casino Portsmouth, Virginia’s first permanent casino, opened in January. The lottery board approved its license in November 2022. Rivers Casino Portsmouth generated almost $21.6 million in November gaming revenues, of which about $14.6 million came from its 1,416 slots, and about $6.9 million from its 81 table games.
The temporary Caesars Virginia casino in Danville opened in May, after receiving its casino license in April. Caesars Virginia’s adjusted gaming revenue totaled $17.5 million in November. Of that, about $12.8 million came from its 830 slots, and the remaining almost $4.69 million came from its 33 table games.
Virginia law assesses a graduated tax on a casino’s adjusted gaming revenue. For November, total casino state taxes were approximately $10.29 million.
Portsmouth received 7% of adjusted gaming revenues from the Rivers Casino Portsmouth, getting $1.5 million. Danville received 6% of the Caesars Virginia casino’s adjusted gaming revenue, which was about $1 million. For the Bristol casino, 6% of its adjusted gaming revenue — roughly $725,000 last month — goes to the Regional Improvement Commission, which the General Assembly established to distribute Bristol casino tax funds throughout Southwest Virginia.
The Problem Gambling Treatment and Support Fund received approximately $82,000 from casino taxes in November, while the Family and Children’s Trust Fund received about $20,590. The remaining roughly $6.9 million remains in the state’s Gaming Proceeds Fund.
Currently, one more casino is planned in Virginia — the HeadWaters Resort & Casino in Norfolk. In June, developers scrapped plans to build a 45,000-square-foot temporary casino, although the Pamunkey Indian Tribe and Tennessee billionaire Jon Yarbrough said in November that they hope to break ground in 2024 after getting city leaders’ sign-off.
Petersburg lawmakers seek to hold a casino referendum in the city by November 2025, which would require the General Assembly to allow a casino in a city with a population below 200,000, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the tax rates allocated to host localities and the RIC.
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