Five reasons to kill the casino bill

Published 4:00 pm, Friday, April 10, 2015

 

It's getting hard to keep up with all the attempts to expand casino-type gambling in Connecticut. Last year, public opposition stopped legislative leaders from putting the gambling game keno in restaurants, bars and convenience stores, and earlier this year a lack of support derailed a proposal by a legislative task force to place video slots in OTB facilities.
 
Now, the Democratic legislative leadership wants to pass a bill that would allow the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes, owners of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, respectively, to jointly build three commercial -- not tribal -- satellite casinos in order to fight out-of-state competition.

The tribes want to open the first "convenience" casino on I-91 between Hartford and the Massachusetts border in an effort to keep Connecticut residents from going to the new $800 million MGM casino being built in Springfield.

They reportedly hope to open the other two casinos along I-95 and I-84 in Fairfield County to defend against New York's casinos. The Hartford-area casino would be heavily oriented to slot machines, with up to 2,000 slots and 50-75 table games, no entertainment, and limited food and beverages. There are about 5,000 slots and 300 table games at Foxwoods.

The bill's supporters argue the new casinos would help both the tribes and the state by slowing the decline in gambling revenue and helping to preserve casinos jobs. But the bill is a bad one for Connecticut for five reasons:

1. The primary economic benefit of Connecticut's casinos has come from their success in drawing over half their combined customers and billions of dollars from other states. These out-of-state customers are the ones who are disappearing because they have new casinos in their own backyard. Building new scaled-down casinos in Connecticut will do nothing to bring them back.

2. While opening convenience casinos would encourage current Connecticut gamblers to stay in state, it would also encourage them to gamble more and attract thousands of other Connecticut residents to gamble, with a corresponding increase in gambling addiction, debt, bankruptcies, broken families and crime.

3. There is a growing body of research on the negative effects of casino gambling's spread. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Institute for American Values, the new local and regional casinos drain wealth from communities, prey on low-income people, weaken nearby businesses, hurt property values and reduce civic participation, family stability and other forms of social capital that are at the heart of a successful society.

Here in Connecticut, a 2014 study from Western Connecticut State University shows that despite a sharp drop in crime in the state as a whole, the number of violent crimes, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, increased in nearby towns after Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun opened.

While the number of thefts declined modestly, the value of property stolen skyrocketed by nearly 40 percent. Interviews with police and judicial officials also indicated increases in prostitution and illicit drug use.

4. In disregard for Connecticut voters, the bill makes no provision for residents of proposed host towns to vote on whether they want a casino in their community, but simply gives the municipality's legislative body the power to make this far-reaching decision.

5. Just over a decade ago, Connecticut showed its opposition to more casinos by repealing the charity gaming law that opened the door to our two current Indian casinos, and then mounted a successful effort to keep its other tribes from gaining federal recognition and the right to open casinos.

Now our governor and congressional delegation are in a battle to stop the federal government from changing regulations that would again create the possibility of more Indian casinos -- and land claims -- in Connecticut. Passage of the new casino bill would make a mockery of the state's argument that it opposes more casinos and would destroy its ability to win that fight.

More casinos are not an answer to Connecticut's economic problems. Instead of encouraging our citizens to gamble away their savings, we need to attract productive, living-wage jobs, promote stable revenue streams and end the runaway spending that's put the state so deeply in debt.

Robert Steele, of Essex, was a U.S. representative from eastern Connecticut and is author of "The Curse: Big-Time Gambling's Seduction of a Small New England Town." State Sen. Tony Hwang, R-28, of Fairfield, is an assistant Senate minority leader, representing the towns of Easton, Fairfield, Newtown, Weston and Westport.


http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Five-reasons-to-kill-the-casino-bill-6192037.php


If you haven't read the book, I encourage you to do so.

Shrewsbury Fire Department HQ. 11 Church Road, Shrewsbury. Saturday Oct. 18th, 7pm.

NoPlainvilleRacino shared a link via Casino-Free Milford.

 

Why vote YES to Repeal the Casino Deal in the upcoming elections? To
speak on the subject, former congressman Robert Steele, author of the “ The Curse” will be in Shrewsbury to enlighten voters on the perils casinos bring to communities. 

Location: Shrewsbury Fire Department HQ. 11 Church Road, Shrewsbury. Saturday Oct. 18th, 7pm. 
Coffee and cookies served served. Open to the public.

WHY VOTE 'YES' TO REPEAL THE CASINO DEAL?

www.scribd.com

Former CT Congressman Robert Steele knows firsthand how casinos affect host communities as well as surrounding communities. He has lived in Ledyard, home of Foxwoods...can you get any more 'firsthand' than that? Come hear what he has to say about casinos before you...

Let's not replicate the mistakes of others!

REPEAL THE CASINO DEAL!

If you haven't already read Robert Steele's book, it's a MUST READ!

Connecticut’s casino boom going bust

Bay State should be wary of hopping on gambling bandwagon

BY: ROBERT STEELE

 

Massachusetts officials repeatedly cited the spectacular success of Connecticut’s two casinos, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, when making the case for legalizing casinos in the Bay State. With a casino repeal measure on the November Massachusetts ballot, it’s worth taking a look at how Connecticut’s casino story has been playing out.

Opened in the early and mid-1990s, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun got off to blistering starts. Facing no competition other than from Atlantic City, 250 miles away, they quickly became the two biggest and most profitable casinos on the planet, attracting over half their combined customers from out of state, creating 20,000 casino jobs, and sending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the state treasury in Hartford.

But the casinos’ revenue has been declining for the past eight years, and we in Connecticut have been learning more and more about the downside of bringing casinos into the state.

For starters, the casinos’ presence has created a pervasive gambling culture in southeastern Connecticut, they’ve skewed the region’s economy heavily toward low-paying service jobs, and they were followed by a sharp spike in the number of Connecticut residents seeking treatment for gambling addiction.

One of the most remarkable findings from a 2009 state-sponsored study was that there had been a 400 percent increase in arrests for embezzlement in Connecticut since the casinos opened, a rate of increase 10 times the national average. A columnist for the New London Day, the area’s largest newspaper, described southeastern Connecticut as the embezzlement capital of America.

Moreover, although the casinos have unquestionably created jobs for their employees and billions in revenue for their owners and the state, those jobs and revenue have come from the gambling losses of their customers, leaving those individuals with less money to spend on other goods and services. At the same time, the casinos have done little to generate spin-off businesses or long-term economic growth for the region. Nor, apparently, have they done much in the final analysis to strengthen the state’s finances. Connecticut receives 25 percent of its casinos’ slots revenue, which has provided the state with more than $6.5 billion dollars over the past 20 years. Yet Connecticut today is in the worst financial shape in its history, with the highest debt and unfunded liabilities relative to state GDP of any state in the nation, according to Barron’s Financial Weekly.

Despite these factors, the conventional wisdom has been that Connecticut’s casinos have been a net economic plus for the state because of their success in attracting so many out-of-state gamblers who leave their money in Connecticut and take their problems home with them.

We don’t know whether that is true or not because the study has never been done, but we do know that the regional monopoly that allowed Connecticut’s casinos to attract so many out-of-staters has now largely disappeared as the Northeast has become increasingly oversaturated with casinos.

When Foxwoods opened in 1992, there were only 10 other casinos in the 12 states comprising the Northeast, all of them in Atlantic City. Today, there are 57 casinos in the Northeast and the number could go to 77 based on those being proposed.

As a result of the growing competition – particularly from Rhode Island’s Twin River Casino and the slots casinos at Aqueduct and Yonkers Racetracks in New York – Connecticut’s slot revenue is now down 34 percent from its peak, with the state government’s take falling from $430 million to under $300 million today. Connecticut’s casinos are laying off employees and increasingly replacing full-time jobs with part-time jobs to reduce wage costs and eliminate benefits, while Foxwoods, which has already defaulted on a half billion dollars of loans, continues to be deeply in debt.

Increased competition is wreaking even greater havoc in Atlantic City, where casino revenue is down 46 percent. The Atlantic Club shut down in January, the Showboat and Trump Plaza are expected to close shortly, and the city’s newest casino, the $2.4 billion Revel, which just opened in April of 2012, has already filed for bankruptcy protection twice and appears likely to close by the end of the year.

Nationally, revenues are down for casinos in a growing number of markets, while Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded its outlook for the US casino industry as a whole from “stable” to “negative.”

Nevertheless, casino proponents continue to argue that Massachusetts’ casino plan will provide a major economic boost for the state by attracting large numbers of out-of-state gamblers and setting aside enough casino revenue to “mitigate” the costs that will inevitably result from encouraging hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents who do not currently gamble to do so.

Perhaps they’re right. But the odds are heavily against it for two reasons.

First, Massachusetts’ proposed casinos may choose to portray themselves as “destination casinos” for out-of-towners and out-of-staters, but the proliferation of casinos across America, and increasingly across the world, is turning most US casinos outside Las Vegas into primarily “convenience” casinos for local people.

Second, there is a growing body of evidence that bringing casinos into a new region is simply not worth it.

Nowhere has the downside been laid out more clearly than in a 2013 report from the Council on Casinos, an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and public policy leaders assembled by the institute for American Values in New York.

“From time to time in American history,” the report begins, “a new institution takes root across the country, and in doing so, changes the nation – changes the physical landscape, impacts the patterns and habits of daily life, affects citizens’ and communities’ economic outcomes, and in some cases even alters relationships between the governing and the governed, the more privileged and the less privileged.”

That, according to the report, is precisely the impact the new casinos are having as they spread across the country, relying on problem gamblers for their revenue base, using highly addictive gambling machines to generate most of their profits, and encouraging increasing numbers of low-income people to gamble away their money, thereby contributing to economic and social inequality in our society. In sum, the report concludes, the new casinos’ long-term costs greatly exceed their benefits. They drain wealth from communities, undermine public health, weaken nearby businesses, and reduce voluntarism, civic participation, family stability, and other forms of social capital that are the heart of a successful community.

Despite the growing costs, both the federal government and most states continue to promote more gambling. On the federal level, the executive branch has adopted positions supporting the further expansion of Indian casinos and the legalization of Internet gambling, while a growing number of state governments are locked in casino border wars in which states late to the casino game are authorizing new casinos and states earlier to the game are seeking to bolster their existing casinos with tax concessions, online betting, reduced regulation, and other measures designed to forestall layoffs and keep the easy money flowing.

With the social and public health costs of casinos increasing and the economic arguments that have been used to justify those costs unraveling, the question for Massachusetts voters this fall is whether it makes sense for their state to join the game.

Robert Steele is a former Republican US congressman from Connecticut and the author of The Curse: Big-Time Gambling’s Seduction of a Small New England Town. His website is rhsteele.com.

 

 

http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Voices/Perspective/Online-Perspectives-2014/Summer/003-Connecticuts-casino-boom-going-bust.aspx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a MUST READ book if you want to know the TRUE cost of Predatory Gambling.... 

When Mr. Steele has a speaking engagement nearby, please go to hear him speak and ask questions about the economic damage Tribal Casinos have done in Connecticut that no one will tell you. 

Book propels Steele's anti-casino campaign

By Brian Hallenbeck
Publication: The Day

Published June 16. 2014 4:00AM

Tim Cook/The Day

Former congressman Bob Steele says he is convinced that governments have no business promoting an industry that many believe is predatory.

Ex-congressman travels all over to warn of downside

Bob Steele steps to a lectern at the Liberal Club in Fall River, Mass., and proceeds to tell another audience about the impact of southeastern Connecticut's Indian casinos.

It's a stump speech, of sorts, but it's devoid of partisan politics, which is perhaps a little surprising in the case of Steele, a former Connecticut congressman and one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate.

He speaks compellingly, his tone measured, his message almost entirely fact-based. Like the 2012 book
whose publication led to this early-June appearance - and the nearly 200 other appearances he's made the last 18 months or so throughout Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island - Steele delivers a cautionary tale.

He tells an audience of fewer than 40 people that Congress opened a Pandora's box when it passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, authorizing Indian casinos. Now, he says, the country is "awash" in casinos, both commercial and tribally owned. And, he adds, state governments are shamelessly promoting the development of more of them, eager to raise revenues without directly raising taxes.

"One wonders how closely they've looked at the downside," he says.

The 75-year-old Steele has immersed himself in that downside, convinced that governments have no business promoting an industry that many believe is predatory, relying, he says, on problem gamblers for 40 to 50 percent of its profits. He recites a litany of social and economic costs casino opponents associate with gaming: local economies skewed toward low-paying service jobs, pressures on housing markets and school systems, and spikes in the numbers of drunken-driving arrests and embezzlements.

In an interview days after his Fall River talk, Steele was asked about his motivation. What drives him to keep showing up wherever casinos are on the agenda? Why travel to Albany one week, Fall River and Granby the next, Boston and Worcester the one after that?

"It's all since the book," he said, referring to "The Curse: Big-Time Gambling's Seduction of a Small New England Town," the "fact-based novel" he worked on for parts of 14 years. Set in a fictional version of Ledyard, where Steele lived from 1977 to 1998, after he left politics, the story plays out against events that took place during the 1990s.

Steele, who now lives in Essex, all but shelved the project after a major publisher lost interest in it around 2009. Then, in 2011, Massachusetts authorized the Bay State's first casinos.

"I thought, if there's ever going to be a strong interest in this topic, it's now," he said.

After the book came out, Steele promoted it at bookstores, libraries and historical societies. Soon enough, he started getting invitations to speak to civic groups, at colleges and before anti-casino groups in places where casinos had been proposed, such as Citizens for the Common Good, the Fall River organization that called him.

Steele typically sells copies of his book at his appearances, but "in 99 percent of the cases" receives no compensation for speaking.

"I do it because I believe in it," he said. "For me, it's a public policy issue. The question is: Should government be encouraging people to gamble just because our political leaders don't have the courage or the foresight to develop more stable forms of revenue?"

About 70 percent of his talk is the same every time, Steele said. The rest is tailored to the audience, be it in Leominster or Palmer, Tewksbury or Milford, East Boston or Newport.

Sometimes he's appeared on panels, but usually he's by himself. His audiences have ranged from five to 500 people, he said.

He offers his listeners hope, pointing out that several Massachusetts towns have rejected casino proposals in referendum votes. Recent poll results even suggest a drive to repeal the Bay State's expanded-gambling law could succeed if the state's highest court allows the question to appear on Election Day ballots in November.

"Nobody gave Repeal the Casino Deal a chance six months ago," Steele said. "Now look at it. The arrogance of political leaders saying it shouldn't be on the ballot is mind-boggling."

He holds up the example of Palmer, the western Massachusetts town that shocked many observers last November when its voters narrowly shot down Mohegan Sun's plan to develop a casino and water park off Exit 8 of the Massachusetts Turnpike.

"Four to five weeks before the referendum, the opponents had no organization," Steele said. "They pulled it together in the last two weeks and educated people. They kept saying, 'The more you know about casinos, the less you like them,' and the message got through. ... And for anyone to suggest that Mohegan Sun didn't make a full effort to win is preposterous."

Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts International, which proposed a project in Springfield, was left without competition for the sole western Massachusetts casino license, which gaming regulators officially awarded Friday.

"I have no doubt the Springfield casino will be very successful - in the first year," Steele said. "After that, who knows?"

b.hallenbeck@theday.com


http://www.theday.com/article/20140616/NWS01/306169957/-1/NWS