Florida Mega-Casino Bill Is Withdrawn Due to Opposition

Florida Mega-Casino Bill Is Withdrawn
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — The richly financed push to bring three mega-casinos to South Florida fizzled in the Legislature on Friday, defeated for the time being by mounting opposition across the state and the uncertainty of election-year politics.

“It was one of these ideas that the longer it sits around and the more it is scrutinized, the smellier it becomes,” said Dan Gelber, a former member of the State House and the South Florida chairman of No Casinos, an advocacy group that fought the bill. “At least this proves that money can’t buy you love sometimes.”

Major casino operators, including Genting Berhad, a Malaysian conglomerate that bought bayfront property in Miami on which to build a mammoth resort, unleashed a torrent of political contributions and lobbyists on Florida’s Capitol. Their job was to convince lawmakers that casinos would churn out jobs and revenue, and help dispel the state’s economic gloom.

But powerful forces aligned quickly against the bill. Led by Disney World and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, opponents argued that Florida’s wholesome family-friendly image would suffer. Other critics soon joined them, including Norman Braman, an auto dealership magnate in South Florida, religious groups, the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association and the mostly conservative Legislature, which is generally opposed to gambling. The groups expressed worries about crime, the impact on local businesses and hotels, and traffic, among other things.

Support began to erode, not build, over the past few months. A poll in late January by Bendixen & Amandi International showed Miami-Dade County voters evenly divided about the prospect of casinos at their doorstep, with 46 percent opposed. Several months ago, a survey of likely voters found 38 percent opposed to casino gambling.

The bill faced its first test before a committee in the State House on Friday but lacked the votes to progress. Rather than lose the vote, Representative Erik Fresen, the Miami Republican who sponsored the House bill, pulled the measure and postponed the vote. There is next to no chance that it will come up for another vote this year.

Both sides agree that the battle is far from over. A retooled casino bill is expected to make a comeback during the 2013 legislative session, when redistricting skirmishes and election wrangling will no longer be a factor.

“I’m sure it will be back,” said Nick Iarossi, a lobbyist for Las Vegas Sands, one of the companies pushing the bill. “There are lots of embedded interests who want to see it happen and who are in it for the long haul.”

Mr. Gelber agreed. “This is Round 1,” he said.

Jessica Hoppe, the senior vice president for government affairs and general counsel of Genting’s Resorts World Miami, said in a statement that the company remained “committed to the vision of world-class destination resorts in the South Florida community.”

After the vote was postponed on Friday, Mr. Fresen said it was important to withdraw the bill “to continue the conversation.” He said he knew that getting the bill through the conservative Legislature would be difficult. If anything, he said, this year’s attempt served as a curtain-raiser, exposing voters and lawmakers to the idea of resort casinos.

Mr. Iarossi, who said the bill would have failed in committee by one vote, acknowledged that the legislation was swamped by layers of competing special interests. They include the Seminole tribe, which runs several large casinos in the state; the “racinos,” or racetrack-gambling parlors in South Florida, which wanted equal treatment; tourism titans and large out-of-state casino companies. All of them sought revisions in the bills to suit their needs. If the bill had been approved, the casinos were required to bring $2 billion each in investment to their projects.

The two bills — one in the Senate and one in the House — tried to bring greater regulation and oversight to gambling in Florida. But in a bid to draw support the bills morphed into two divergent proposals, with the Senate bill vastly expanding gambling in the state, a move that further complicated efforts.

“This is just a very difficult issue with a lot of moving parts,” Mr. Iarossi said. “I don’t think any one opponent could stop it. I think it’s a combination of factors.”

The fact that redistricting is taking place this year, leaving a number of lawmakers uncertain about which districts they will run in and who will run against them, also contributed to the bill’s downfall, Mr. Iarossi said.

“The safe vote is no,” Mr. Iarossi added.

But Mr. Gelber said that gambling proponents tried to sugarcoat the impact that large casinos would have had on South Florida, inflating the benefits. The tactic, he said, ultimately backfired and bolstered the opposition.

“There was a lot of deception in how they sold it initially,” Mr. Gelber said. “They said it was not an expansion of gambling, yet they are building the largest casino in the world, and they are saying it’s not going to change the texture of our quality of life.”

As Mr. Gelber geared up to raise money for the effort to stop the bill, he found it was quite easy. Mr. Braman and Tony Goldman, the real estate developer, were the first to write big checks. Soon, homeowners’ associations in Miami were railing against the bill and testifying before the Legislature.

“They thought people would just say, ‘Oh, what a pretty picture,’ and line up for it,” Mr. Gelber added. “They got a community that was thoughtful, that said this isn’t who we want to be.”