Log in
My Account
Subscribe 99¢ for 3 months
Newsletter

Today's Digital Newspaper

The Denver Gazette

loader-image
weather icon 49°F
Weather from WeatherAPI

Daily Weather Report
Powered By:

Login
My Account
Subscribe
Newsletter

Archive Information

Carrier Portal

Search

Buy Our Photos

New charitable gaming board meets following Gazette series

By October 24, 2025 | updated 7 hours ago

Bingo balls are still the most common way to choose numbers on bingo nights, but electronic methods are gaining in popularity.

The latest iteration of Colorado’s long-defunct advisory board for charitable gaming met Friday for the first time since legislators revived it more than 18 months ago.

Colorado Watch logo

The Charitable Gaming Board did little more than elect its chairman, Maytham Alshadood, the director of business licensing for the Secretary of State’s Office, and its vice chairperson, Michelle Kelley, a certified games manager for the Erie High School Boosters.

The seven-member board was assembled just as The Gazette concluded a three-month investigation into the state’s $110 million charitable gaming industry. The first meeting comes just weeks after the three-part series was published.

The new board replaces the Bingo-Raffle Advisory Board, a nine-member panel designed to counsel the secretary of state on regulations that hadn’t met in years –- no one bothered to show up for meetings despite a statutory requirement to have two a year, records show -– and was at the precipice of being dissolved in 2023. Lobbying efforts convinced legislators that having industry oversight was too important, resulting in a new Charitable Gaming Board being created in early 2024 with a promise of better monitoring and more industry involvement.  

The new board is to meet at least six times a year.

But Gov. Jared Polis had only named three people to the board by September, claiming difficulty in finding anyone willing to serve. Secretary of State Jena Griswold named her own appointees last month.

It’s unclear how much of The Gazette’s findings — felons illegally running bingo games, nonprofits getting little of the millions of dollars wagered, prohibited payments being made to bingo volunteers, raffle winners not being notified because nonprofits don’t have to — will be taken up by the new board or legislators and appointees didn’t discuss any business at Friday’s meeting.

At least one board member privately said future meetings would take up some of The Gazette’s findings.

“It’s really cool that we’ve got a group of professionals together that will be able to oversee bingo in a professional way,” Corky Kyle, the vice president of the Colorado Bingo Association, said at the meeting. “The old board lost its speed and lost its way.”

The board only has the authority to make recommendations to Griswold’s office and cannot make any policy or rule changes on its own. That’s partly what drew friction from the industry in years past with board members saying they lacked any meaningful authority to make substantive decisions.

The Secretary of State’s Office was chosen to oversee charitable gaming when voters added it to the state constitution in the 1950s. All other forms of gaming are regulated by the state Department of Revenue.

It is the only state to do it that way.

Voters have repeatedly defeated any efforts at changing the oversight process.

Including Alshadood and Kelley, the other board members are: Ben Vagher, a certified games manager for Trinity Catholic Church and the Broomfield Rotary; Fred Sabados, the owner of FASE, which operates four bingo halls; Richard Lemon, the president of the Colorado Bingo Association and owner of Rocky Mountain Bingo Supply; and Todd Van Sant, commander of VFW Post 9644 in Sheridan.

The board’s next meeting has not been scheduled.

https://gazetteedit.wpenginepowered.com/2025/10/colorado-bingo-charitable-gaming-investigation
https://gazetteedit.wpenginepowered.com/2025/10/colorado-bingo-nonprofits-irs-taxes
https://gazetteedit.wpenginepowered.com/2025/10/colorado-charitable-gaming-felons
David Migoya

Reporter

PREV

PREVIOUS

Car towed? Here’s the what the PUC suggests

Colorado Public Utilities Commission offers on-line guidance Find your car towed from where you parked it? Maybe it’s got a boot on it? Either scenario generates anxiety, stress and financial hardship. Predatory and illegal towing and immobilization have resulted in the state legislature passing new laws to help protect consumers and give tow companies room […]

NEXT

NEXT UP

AI for hotel pricing? Boulder startup sees room for opportunities in industry

When Matt Schwartz was pitching the idea for a hotel pricing company that uses artificial intelligence to a industry vendor visiting Denver several years ago, he recalled how excited the vendor was at the thought. Many hotels do the math for how much to charge a room by hand or Excel spreadsheets. And most of […]