Restructure gambling law, board

The Slot Barn Industry spent buckets of cash...was it $60 million? convincing the Pennsylvania legislature to pass slip shod legislation at midnight on the Fourth of July.

That legislation neglected any provision addressing children and pets left in vehicles by the Gambling Addict because everyone, it seems, failed to conduct their due diligence into a known problem created by this predatory industry.

A few were even content to proclaim their ignorance of the Industry for the record:

"One thing that we never expected was for people to leave their kids inside their cars while they went inside to gamble," said Fred Harran, Bensalem's public safety director.

"Of all the problems we thought about that were going to happen, this is one thing that was probably inconceivable," State Rep. Gene DiGirolamo (R., Bucks) said at a noon news conference Thursday in Bensalem.



From: Smack into the face of addiction

"It's amazing to me that legislators are surprised at this stuff," said Paul Boni, a Philadelphia lawyer who has represented anti-casino groups. "You are looking smack into the face of the addiction.

"They are surprised because they haven't thought about it and haven't looked into the issue."

During the 10 years ending in 2003, KidsAndCars.org collected accounts of more than 30 cases of parents' leaving children in locked cars outside casinos.

That was shown to be a lowball count when the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal studied Indiana Gaming Commission records to reveal 37 incidents in which 72 children were left unattended at casinos in that state in 1999 and 2000.

News stories contain dozens of accounts of gamblers across the nation who left children in vehicles.

A few cases have proved fatal.


In 1997, a 10-day-old girl died in a car while her mother gambled for hours in a South Carolina casino.

The next year, a 3-year-old Louisiana boy died in hot van while his nanny played video poker for five hours.

In 2004, a 9-month-old Florida girl died in her car seat outside a track where her father was betting on horses.

This comment should surprise no one and parallels the process in Massachusetts-

The law was written to serve the casino industry....



Restructure gambling law, board
For all of the 21 major recommendations made by a statewide investigative grand jury in its withering critique of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, it stopped short of the most fundamental one.

After a two-year investigation of the board's award of casino licenses and its related operations, the grand jury did not recommend any criminal charges. That, however, does not validate board Chairman Gregory Fajt's self-serving assertion that the board's work has been an unmitigated success. Like many other public officials, Mr. Fajt mistook the lack of criminal charges for proof of effective public service.

The board might well have operated in accordance with the law but the problem is that law itself is deeply flawed. Mr. Fajt crowed that much of what the grand jury found previously had been reported in the state's newspapers, calling it "old news." Unfortunately, that just indicates that lawmakers will pay no more attention to the grand jury report than they did to previous revelations of the law's many profound shortcomings. The Legislature, after all, has ignored most of the recommendations by a separate grand jury that made a host of sensible suggestions for the Legislature's reform in the wake of the "Bonusgate" corruption investigation.

Some of the needed reforms have been obvious from the beginning. Foremost among those is the need for investigations related to casino regulation to be conducted by an independent body rather than by an in-house bureau that reports to the board.

No gamble for some applicants

But the principal problem is one that afflicts much of what the state Legislature does. The law was written to serve the casino industry, the politicians who advocated for it and specific narrow interests within that industry, rather than the public interest. For example, Pennsylvania's casino law is the only one among the states that allows someone with a felony conviction to obtain a license - a provision that applied to a single applicant and eventual licensee, Dunmore businessman Louis DeNaples.

Because of its structure, the seven-member board is a political extension of the Legislature. The governor appoints three members and the leaders of each of the major party caucuses in the House and Senate appoint four - one each. Although a simple majority is needed to approve license awards and policy decision, all four of the legislative appointees have to agree. Thus, each legislative appointee has veto power. A 6-1 vote is meaningless unless the majority includes all four legislative appointees.

That is a formula for chicanery. As the report pointed out, attorney William Conaboy of Scranton, who was appointed to the board by then-Senate Minority Leader Robert Mellow of Lackawanna County, was badgered by the Democratic caucus after he said he would recuse himself from voting on the DeNaples license application. Mr. Conaboy was friendly with Mr. DeNaples and had represented him on several matters. Recusal was the appropriate course.

Mr. Conaboy testified that Mr. Mellow had told him that he wanted a casino in his senatorial district. Mount Airy Casino Resort, Mr. DeNaples' project, was the only application to meet that description.

Establish independent board

Reform is needed even though only one casino license remains to be awarded. The Legislature should begin by making the board answerable to the public rather than to individual politicians and their patrons. An independent commission should recommend appointees to the governor, whose nominees then should be subject to confirmation hearings and votes in the Senate. There should be no individual veto among board members; each vote should count.

Such a board would undertake needed reforms without the embarrassment of having to be cajoled into doing so by a criminal grand jury.

For additional information:
Casino-Free Philadelphia
Stop Predatory Gambling
United to Stop Slots in Massachusetts