Retirees, nurses, doctors and the occasional Baylor University faculty member are part of the regular lunch hour crowd at The Musical Chair, a used furniture store at 710 N. Valley Mills Drive.
They come not to buy furniture but to play the store’s eight-liners – video slot machines that can only award non-cash prizes worth less than $5.
“They’ve become family,” Nancy Johnson, 58, told The Waco Bridge. She said the $200 to $300 the machines bring in each week “are what help me stay afloat.”
That will end Jan. 1 when the city enforces a new ban on eight-liners.
Johnson joined about a dozen Wacoans at Tuesday’s Waco City Council meeting to protest the ordinance on its second and final reading.
City officials and the Waco Police Department have argued the machines are magnets for crime and constitute illegal gambling under state law. The Texas Supreme Court last year handed the city of Fort Worth a victory in its yearslong legal battle against eight-liner operators, closing the loophole that allowed the machines to proliferate across Texas in recent decades.
The city of Waco in the past has tried regulating the game room industry by requiring licenses, limiting the number of machines and cracking down on legal violations related to the machines. But Fort Worth’s legal victory paved the way for an outright ban.
The Waco council voted unanimously in favor of the ordinance, but not before hearing from a cross-section of residents who came to the machines’ defense.
Senior citizens told the council that banning the machines would eliminate an outlet for socializing. Commercial property owners countered police statements tying eight-liners to crime, saying they had seen no such correlation.
A real estate attorney and convenience store and game room owners told the council the ban would cause property vacancies to skyrocket, inadvertently increasing crime.
“For many small businesses like mine, they help us stay open,” said Amy Knight, owner of Jezebel Gypsy Boutique on West Waco Drive. “There are over 200 game rooms and (eight-liner) locations across Waco supporting hundreds of employees. … A ban would be devastating.”
Gambling is illegal in Texas, but the machines exploited a now closed loophole called the “fuzzy animal exception,” which was designed to protect children’s arcade games from Texas’ gambling regulations. Under a 1995 state law, games intended for “bona fide amusement purposes” that give out noncash prizes worth $5 or less are exempt.
The state’s upper courts ruled in the Fort Worth case that eight-liners do not qualify under the exception.
Waco city officials view the ordinance as coming into compliance with that ruling.
Meanwhile, in presentations to the council, police officials have link ed eight-liner businesses with crime.
Around those businesses, “you start getting discharges of firearms and that sort of stuff,” Waco Assistant Police Chief Mark Norcross told the council in September. He cited departed data claiming the machines were correlated with a five-fold increase in calls for police service.
Waco real estate attorney David Dickson told council members Tuesday that “on a very short notice, you’re effectively going to cancel leases for a number of landlords.”
He pleaded to extend the ordinance’s effective date past Jan. 1 in order to give businesses and landlords time to adjust.
Johnson, the furniture owner, was hoping for more time to adjust as well.
“If this is what they have to do, then great, but to do it so abruptly and give us 70 days notice to make sure we’ve got our leases covered?” she said.
“It’ll really damage my credit, and where do I go from there?”
