Wisconsin: Gambling at tracks didn't work

Wisconsin learned a difficult lesson.
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Massachusetts has the extraordinary benefit of examining the experience of other states.

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The more one learns about the flaws of predatory gambling, the more one understands that a foundation built on casino capitalism or expanded gambling is destined to fail.

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Taxpayers can't afford to subsidize wealthy casino investors at the expense of others.

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Story of gambling a losing one

Twenty years ago this month, Kaukauna Mayor Ron Van De Hey couldn’t have been happier.

He was on a panel at the annual winter meeting of Wisconsin Associated Press editors to discuss the opening of Wisconsin to gambling, and his city had just been awarded a license to operate a pari-mutuel greyhound racing track, one of only five in the state.

The competition for the greyhound tracks had been intense that summer of 1989. Only two years before, the voters of Wisconsin overturned the state’s historic anti-gambling laws and passed a long-debated constitutional amendment to allow the creation of a state-run lottery and the legalization of pari-mutuel betting.

Wisconsin municipalities were invited to apply for licenses and after weeks of cities designing financial incentives, contentious lobbying and questionable secret meetings, the state’s newly formed Racing Board announced that Kaukauna, Lake Delton, Hudson, Geneva Lakes and Kenosha were the winners.

Mayor Van De Hey told the state’s newspaper editors that “the people of Kaukauna are feeling very good about themselves” and he predicted that the track would mean at least 300 jobs to his city, not to mention an expected influx of visitors who would eat, sleep and shop in the Outagamie County city, which had a population of 12,000 back then.

And for a brief time, the five dog tracks did well. It is estimated that 3.5 million people went to gamble on the dogs in 1992, the first full year they were all open. I’m sure Kaukauna got a nice kick to its economy those first few years.

Alas, like so much that relies on the fortunes of gambling, no more.

The Kaukauna track has been closed for years. In fact, the last of the five tracks that brought so much joy and hope for the future to their cities will close at the end of this month. Dairyland Greyhound Park in Kenosha, which had been holding out hope of getting permission to open a Menominee Indian casino at the track, announced it will close New Year’s Eve and let go its 180 remaining employees. The casino wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, if ever, and Dairyland was losing $7 million a year.

The irony is that the constitutional amendment that created the dog tracks also led to their demise.

For when Wisconsin lifted its gambling prohibition, it indirectly opened the doors to Indian casinos. At about the same time the dog tracks were being built, federal Judge James Doyle ruled that because Wisconsin had a lottery and legalized betting, it also had to allow the Indian tribes to open casinos on land they owned.

In the end, dog racing couldn’t compete with blackjack and slots. Besides, the novelty of racing greyhounds quickly wore off.

But such is the age-old lesson of gambling. There are always more losers than winners.