Beyond Red & Blue

Casino culture

Despite last week's burying of Gov. Deval Patrick's casino bill, don't look for the gambling industry to go quietly into the good night.  The Boston Herald reports today that casino interests are keeping a steady eye on the Bay State for fresh opportunities to take another run at legalizing casino gambling.  "Politics is patience and perseverance," Jan Jones, government affairs cheese for Harrah's Entertainment, tells the Herald.  It almost sounds like the sort of keep-on-keepin'-on attitude that eventually led to victory in heroic battles for women's suffrage or voting rights for blacks. 

Those are not exactly the sort of references used by casino critics to describe the relentless drive of the gambling industry.  In a 2005 article in CommonWealth magazine on the perennial push for expanded gambling, state Rep. Dan Bosley, the Legislature's leading casino opponent, offered a different sort of imagery:

One year, the Legislature voted down a gaming bill on a Monday or Tuesday, then, “on Thursday one of the gambling interests came in to see me and says, ‘How can we change your mind,’” [Bosley] says. “It’s like Freddy Krueger. It keeps showing up no matter how many movies it dies at the end of.”

Gaming the casino job numbers

Today's Boston Sunday Globe features a front-page story by Sean Murphy questioning the Patrick administration's claim that 30,000 construction jobs would be created if the governor's proposal for three casinos were approved.  The Globe story calls Patrick's jobs estimate "excessively optimistic," and backs up that contention with plenty of evidence from similar projects that generated far fewer hard-hat jobs.

The story should come as no shock to CommonWealth readers, since it sounds an echo of the questions raised in contributing writer Phil Primack's story for the winter issue of the magazine, published in late January.  In "Playing the Numbers," Primack threw plenty of cold water on the idea of 10,000 construction jobs per casino, citing figures from construction of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and from a huge expansion project at Connecticut's Mohegan Sun casino to suggest that the administration was wildly overstating the number of construction jobs that could be created.  The 2006 announcement of a planned $740 million expansion at Mohegan, for example, said the project would generate 1,400 construction jobs, less than 15 percent of the number of jobs the administration claims would be generated by the construction of a $1 billion casino.

The CommonWealth story raised doubts not only about the construction jobs numbers, but also questioned the administration's claims concerning the scale of gambling operations that the regional market could support and the touted spillover benefits on the local economy.

Patrick's proposal faces a tough audience in the House of Representatives, where Speaker Sal DiMasi remains wary of casinos.  Meanwhile, Rep. Dan Bosley, who chairs the economic development committee that will hold hearings on the bill, is the Legislature's staunchest opponent of expanded gambling.  Bosley has long questioned the economic benefits claimed by casino proponents.  The CommonWealth story and today's Globe report aren't likely to help the administration's cause when he gavels the hearings to order.

Arlington bets on casino revenue

Gov. Deval Patrick's proposed budget for fiscal 2009 includes revenue from casino licensing fees, even though casino gambling has not yet been approved by the Legislature (see Boston Globe story by Frank Phillips). Now town goverments may follow Patrick's lead, if a story by Shauna Stavely in the Arlington Advocate is any indication. Stavely reports that Arlington town officials are basing revenue projections on the assumption that casino money will make up for any shortfall in aid from the state lottery. Town manager Brian Sullivan says that $657,000 in local aid "depends on the casino plan," adding that "if support can't be garnered for casino revenue, then [the governor and the Legislature] need to find it somewhere else."

A reminder: Contributing writer Phil Primack examines the economic assumptions behind Patrick's casino plan in the current issue of CommonWealth.

Megabucks

The Sunday New York Times has a story and interactive map on state lotteries. Massachusetts is singled out as having "the highest lottery spending per resident, at $699, and the highest portion of lottery sales that go to prizes, at 72 percent." At $4.5 billion, the Bay State is second only to New York in total lottery sales, and we're well ahead of California, which has more than five times our population.