Minersville Working on Revision to Its Cumbersome Skill Games Ordinance

Borough officials in Minersville are working on a revision to its ordinance governing Pennsylvania Skill machines after finding the revision passed last year became too cumbersome.

Minersville was one of the first municipalities in Schuylkill County to drastically inflate its tax, or license fee, on individual Skill machines operating in the borough. It went from $60 to $1,000 per machine.

However, the Borough began invoicing businesses with those machines $250 quarterly and according to discussion at Wednesday’s council meeting, it just became too much over the course of 2025.

“It’s an administrative nightmare,” Interim Borough Manager Megan Paul says.

They also suspect that businesses were gaming the system by removing some machines prior to compliance checks performed by Minersville Police.

One quick change that council is likely to adopt is to charge businesses annually, rather than quarterly. And businesses with Skill machines will have 90 days to pay the fee per machine.

It’ll be on businesses to report new machines added to their stores and pay a pro-rated fee if say, for instance, a machine is added in April.

There is already a penalty on businesses that add machines and don’t report them to the Borough.

They believe that having one formal, annual compliance audit with spot checks throughout the year, will cut down on the amount of machines being shuffled around to avoid paying the tax on them.

“There’s too much movement,” Police Chief Jeffrey Bowers says.

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