The Definition of A Sucker's Bet

Study first, then roll the dice
FRED LeBRUN Commentary


Here we go again with another throw of the dice at expanding true casino gambling in New York.

Turning us into another slot machine state with the major culture change that goes with it has never been a good bet for New York, even back when we would have been the first in the Northeast to do so. It's an even worse bet now, since the state is ringed by casino competition in other states and Canadian provinces vying for the ever-more-finite betting dollar.

Now, our governor hasn't actually endorsed a move to legalize Las Vegas-style casino gambling in the state, only to look into it as an option through his deputy, Bennett Liebman. A constitutional amendment would be probably needed. Curiously, there is no mention of casinos or how he feels about them in Cuomo's voluminous pre-election policy playbooks.

The Mohawks, Senecas and Oneidas get around our constitutional prohibition because they are considered sovereign nations, in terms of this issue at least, answering only to federal gaming laws. Racinos, like the one in Saratoga Springs, are not really casinos, but rather rooms full of gaudy instant lottery machines called video lottery terminals.

Liebman has been assigned to develop policy recommendations on various gaming questions facing the state, including the recurring casino issue. We know Liebman as the highly respected former executive director of Albany Law School's Government Law Center and as an acknowledged expert on gambling matters, so he's the right man for the job. Not an enviable job, I might add.

How you look at gambling and gaming in New York depends on your perspective -- what you expect to get out of it. It is it jobs? Revenue? What's the tolerance for a host of associated costs and social ills?

To my mind, casinos offer us a few pluses, many minuses, and a whole lot of questions. Over-arching common sense tells us that plunging into the gambling world for economic development is essentially the definition of a sucker's bet.

As usual, what we don't know is what Cuomo really wants. Does he want private as well as Indian-run casino gambling in New York, as his father's former attorney, James Featherstonhaugh, is promoting?

Featherstonhaugh is president of the New York State Gaming Association, a group of nine state racino operators lobbying for a constitutional amendment to elevate their operations to the real thing. It would seem the governor is nudging us in that direction.

Or is he simply using the threat of expanding casinos as leverage to renegotiate compacts with existing Native American casinos owners, which could include expanding such operations?

The Paterson administration's midnight deal to bring in a tribe from Wisconsin to start a casino in Monticello, Sullivan County, fell through.

Native-run casinos in New York are withholding the state's negotiated share of profits, hundreds of millions of dollars, over purported contractual issues that developed after the state started collecting taxes on sales to non-Indians shopping at reservations. So there's much to negotiate here.

Andrew Cuomo's own lawyerly rhetoric on the subject of expanding casinos is somewhat deceptive.

He would have you believe a proliferation of privately owned casinos in the state is an easy and natural progression from what we have: "You have gaming in this state, and by the way, you have gaming in other states ... it's already happening. So if there is gaming, how should it be done?"

This implies that the only thing left for us is to do is to bring order and regulation to the inevitable. Poppycock. There's gaming, and then there's gaming. What we have, we can handle. What's proposed is a quantum leap into the unknown in terms of what we would get for a far more modest increase in state revenues than promoters routinely predict.

Look around us. Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have big-time casinos, yet as states they are as financially troubled as we are, maybe more so. Massachusetts is on the verge of passing its own casino legislation, which is as controversial as it will no doubt be here.

It seems that promises of casinos near the New York-Massachusetts border are being used by pro-casino advocates in both states to goad quick approval, to be the first to build.

Cuomo's call to action seems an extension of that.

The pro-casino New York State Gaming Association promises an economic impact study for the governor within a month. No doubt that study will paint the rosiest of pictures. What screams to be done to bring some objectivity to the table is for the state to do its own study. The impact a full-fledged casino at Aqueduct Raceway would have on New York City deserves particular and extensive scrutiny.

With such huge public policy implications -- a change in the state's direction on gambling -- such a study seems like a no-brainer. Then again, if we don't see the state looking for objective analysis, I guess we'll finally fathom what Andrew Cuomo really wants.