Press Release - July 9, 2026

State College, PA — According to newly released revenue data, the newly reopened Happy Valley Casino in State College, Pennsylvania, has joined a growing list of successful smokefree casinos in Pennsylvania. The completely smokefree property achieved a sharp increase in gambling revenue, jumping from about $6.5 million to more than $31 million in just its second month of operation.

“Happy Valley’s latest revenue data provides more evidence for what we have known all along: operating smokefree is good for business,” said Jennifer Rubolino, former casino dealer and leader of Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects Pennsylvania (CEASE PA). “As more casinos go smokefree in Pennsylvania and across the country, it is getting increasingly hard for industry executives to defend their false narrative that they need indoor smoking to bring in revenue. Happy Valley, along with the smokefree Parx casino and Parx Shippensburg, proves that casinos in Pennsylvania and beyond can protect their workers and serve their customers by eliminating toxic secondhand smoke from their facilities.”

A thriving smokefree casino is nothing new for Pennsylvania — Parx Casino, which voluntarily ended indoor smoking in 2020, is consistently the state’s highest performing brick and mortar casino. According to casino.org, Parx’s smokefree policies made the casino a preferred destination for patrons. A  2025 Spectrum webinar also noted that Parx saw the strongest post-COVID recovery in table games revenue among Philadelphia-area casinos. Many states, including Pennsylvania’s competitors of New York and Ohio, already require casinos to be smokefree with no impact on the industry's bottomline.

Pennsylvania casino workers are urging support for legislation to protect workers from harmful secondhand smoke. Employee unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) have joined CEASE in their fight to end smoking in casinos, and a majority of members of UNITE-HERE Local 54 support closing the casino smoking loophole, although the union’s leadership has fought against the movement in direct opposition to its members. House Bill 880, introduced by Representative Dan Frankel (D-District 23), would amend the Clean Indoor Air Act to close the casino smoking loophole, but despite garnering bipartisan support, it has not yet come up for a vote.

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Casino Employees Against Smoking (Harmful) Effects (CEASE) is a group of thousands of casino dealers and other frontline gaming workers that formed after indoor smoking returned on July 4, 2021 in Atlantic City, NJ and has expanded to states around the country. CEASE is fighting to permanently remove smoking from our workplaces. 

See what casino workers say about working in secondhand smoke: the Real Deal