A showdown brewing since 2011 came to a head in 2014.
As the year began, anticasino activists gathered support for a statewide ballot initiative to repeal the 2011 law.
Just two towns in eastern Massachusetts — Everett and Revere — voted in referendum to host a casino. There was only one license for the greater Boston area — the last big untapped market for casinos in the Northeast.
Everett supported Las Vegas casino operator Steve Wynn's $1.2 billion proposal for a site in that city along the Mystic River.
"There isn't a player in the United States of America that doesn't know our company, and isn't dying to come and visit a new Wynn resort if we build one," Wynn told the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in January.
Mitchell Etess, chief executive of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, said Mohegan Sun's competing $1.3 billion proposal for Revere would revive the waning Suffolk Downs racetrack.
"If you want big players from all over the country, we've got them in our database — they're our customers," he said. "That's how you are the highest-grossing casino in the western hemisphere."
But there was a complication with the Revere plan: If that city got the casino, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said his city should be designated a host community, with the accompanying privileges. Massachusetts Gaming Commission chair Steve Crosby pushed back.
"Don't come in here and say we've been putting the cart before the horse," Crosby said. "What you want to do is rearrange the cart and the horse."
In May, Crosby had to recuse himself from the process after he was criticized for attending a private Kentucky Derby party at Suffolk Downs.
The remaining gaming commission members decided against granting Boston host community status. Walsh threatened to sue.
"The commission is supposed to be an impartial body of government that clearly has made statements against Boston, have been constantly saying that we're whining, which I think is absurd," Walsh said.
In June, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned an earlier decision by Attorney General Martha Coakley, ruling the state-wide repeal referendum could appear on the November ballot.
Anti-casino activists like Celeste Myers of the No Eastie Casino group were jubilant.
“At every juncture we gather more and more believers. There are a lot of folks that are jaded, that don’t believe in the political process. But the people are having a voice.”
Still, the state gaming commission steamed ahead. In September, after many last minute negotiations, it awarded the eastern Massachusetts casino license to Wynn Resorts. Mayor Carlo DeMaria said the casino would change the face of Everett.
"We’ll no longer be the butt end of the city of Boston but we’ll be the entrance to the city of Everett,” he said.
Revere Mayor Dan Rizzo said the commission's decision meant the end of the Suffolk Downs racetrack.
“I hope for the sake of the commonwealth and for all of those jobs that we’re going to be losing sometime tomorrow that that choice bodes well for everybody,” Rizzo said.
Revere tried to sort out what to do next and Wynn and Everett got to work, even though it was still possible voters would repeal the state gambling law in November.
But November 4 came, and it was apparent casino supporters were right not to worry. In a rather anticlimactic end to the multifaceted casino debate that had gripped the state, less than 40 percent of voters said Massachusetts should repeal its gambling law.
That clears the way for casinos, for the first time, to plant roots in the Commonwealth in the New Year.
