Maryland's Early Christmas

Our Say: With big bucks at stake, gambling ad war begins
Posted: Sunday, September 2, 2012


MGM Resorts International’s opening bid in the great Maryland gaming auction of 2012 is $2.3 million. The casino company paid that amount to a political action committee to lobby for the expansion of gaming in this state.

That’s roughly 0.07 percent of the global company’s net income for 2011, which was more than $3.1 billion. By MGM Resorts standards, it’s scarcely petty cash. A gambling titan trying to convince Maryland voters — and particularly Prince George’s County voters — to let it build an $800 million casino at National Harbor will spend far more if it has to. And it will most likely have to.

True, the gambling package rushed through the General Assembly last month was designed to mollify the owners and prospective owners of the five casinos approved by the voters in 2008. To do this, it adds table games, cuts tax rates and makes it possible for casinos to stay open 24 hours a day. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., who did more than any other legislator to fill this goody bag for casino owners, insists that the owners of the Maryland Live! casino at Arundel Mills mall have pledged to stay out of the upcoming campaign.

But MGM Resorts apparently expected opposition; an official spoke darkly of using the $2.3 million to “blunt some of the attacks funded by outside forces.” (We didn’t realize MGM Resorts was a local company.) And right on cue, a group backed by Penn National Gaming started anti-gambling law advertisements last week.

Penn National not only runs the casino in Cecil County but the one in Charles Town, W.Va., that stands to be hammered by yet another big casino to draw customers from the Washington, D.C., area and Northern Virginia. It also owns Rosecroft Raceway in Prince George’s County, which theoretically could be the site of the new casino authorized by the law — but Penn National, like everyone else, knows the fix is in for the National Harbor location, preferred by Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III.

So Marylanders will probably remember this fall for yet another flood of overwrought pro- and anti-casino ads. At least there’s some sour amusement to be derived from the name of the pro-gambling-expansion group to which MGM Resorts contributed: For Maryland Jobs and Schools. Did someone else register the name For Motherhood, Apple Pie and Old Glory?

Maryland officials will have to make sure casinos abide by the disclosure rules. (We reported Friday that Maryland Live! officials are being investigated for possibly failing to sufficiently disclose campaign contributions.) Maryland voters will just have to try to look behind the pious sentiments and hyperbole and consider whether the legislature’s hastily assembled plan will expand or shrink the net take for taxpayers.

And Anne Arundel County voters will have to consider whether there’s any advantage to this jurisdiction in approving competition certain to cut into the income of Maryland Live!, which is already shunting millions of dollars into county coffers.


http://www.capitalgazette.com/opinion/our_say/our-say-with-big-bucks-at-stake-gambling-ad-war/article_18fcb4bc-3444-55df-84f2-b1e8015bd48d.html