Acknowledged or not, casino gambling has become a perennial question for the Massachusetts Legislature, spanning all of my tenure in the General Court from 1969– when, as a member of the House, I filed the first bill to legalize the “numbers game” as a source of revenue for the state– through my 13 consecutive terms on the New Bedford City Council from 1980 to the present (where the issue boils to the surface yearly, even culminating in two citywide ballot questions that have won voter approval each time)– to my tenure in the state Senate from 1975 to ’78 and back to my service in the House since 1999. Avoided for years, the question seems about to be answered. I hope the answer will be a strong “yes”!
Massachusetts has sat back for far too long while New Jersey, then other states– most recently our neighbor to the south, Connecticut– ventured out where Massachusetts feared to tread. They have reaped the benefits of what is a mega-trend in this country, the gaming industry, with its apparently endless windfall of profits for those states that have seen the future and have embraced it. We in Massachusetts have seen the future and said it is a phantasm, a hideous dream, and never dared to venture a toe into the water.
Perhaps now, however, with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University releasing its study of Massachusetts Indian Gaming, we can put our skepticism behind us and make the move that it has long been my contention should be made in order to relieve, at least in part, the need for more revenue to bolster local aid, education, social programs, and an unending list of unmet needs. The introduction of casino gambling could give the state budget a much-needed infusion of up to $350 million in the coming fiscal year, and a steady stream of revenue far into the future. It would also keep gaming business that is now going across our borders into neighboring states within Massachusetts, providing business and job opportunities in communities like mine.
First, let’s dispose of one bone of contention– that legalized gambling would be the end of a free society or the beginning of a descent into iniquity. Let me quote from the press release announcing the Harvard study last May:
“With respect to social problems commonly attributed to gaming, the Harvard study notes that two federal government gambling commission reviews have found that pathological gambling does not rise in parallel with gambling activity. The study also reports that even though revenues expended on wagering have increased sixteen-fold and doubled as a percentage of personal income, the national lifetime gambling pathology rate has remained steady at approximately 1 percent. The study concludes that Massachusetts is unlikely to witness a substantial jump in social problems since gaming is so widely available to New Englanders already.”
“Most casino policy analyses jump straight to social costs without evaluating social benefits,” observed Jonathan Taylor, one of the study’s authors. “When researchers have looked at both together, the evidence is clear. Casinos don’t bring socioeconomic decline, they generally bring net improvement.”
Net improvement is something New Bedford, as well as the Commonwealth in its fiscal woes, could use. My hometown is in need of a major growth industry, and I don’t know of any industry in the country that is on anywhere near as fast a track as casino gambling. Wherever casino gambling has gone in the country, there has been an upsurge in employment opportunities. And I am talking about opportunities not only for those who are unemployed or soon will be but also for those who are under-employed, and for the elderly who may want to make some extra money to augment their pension, and for young people who are in college and need to earn money to cover their tuition and expenses. (There would undoubtedly be reasonable age restrictions for working in a casino, but there are jobs that are part and parcel of the casino operation that would help college students finance their educations.)
Skeptics of industry as a boon for our economy suggest that the jobs in gambling are a sucker bet. But here is a sampling of the jobs a typical casino generates, in addition to hundreds of flexible, part-time jobs ideal for retired people who need to supplement their pensions and for college students, of which we in the New Bedford area have thousands, at UMass-Dartmouth, Bristol Community College, and Southern New England School of Law. In addition to a general manager, there are the following department heads: casino operations, finance, casino credit, security, surveillance, marketing, legal, human resources, facilities, food and beverage, internal audit, and administrative executive assistants. Those are just “executive” jobs. In the legal department, for instance, there would need to be an associate counsel, compliance manager, risk management manager, and clerical staff. In the human resources area: human resources employee manager, human resources generalist, human resources clerical staff, training and development manager, and human resources trainer. In casino administration positions include operations office manager, operations office clerk, and operations trainer.
When the first resorts in Atlantic City opened in 1978, I had an opportunity to view, firsthand, their operations as a “committee of one” from the Massachusetts state Senate. I was not thrilled. Atlantic City seemed to miss the point: They put all the casinos on their beautiful waterfront instead of leaving the waterfront for people who wanted to use the beaches. (Casino players, after all, are there to gamble, not to look at the water!) They could have steered casinos to the more desolate areas of the city, where they would have had a positive economic impact. Instead, it became obvious to me that it was just a matter of time before all of the boardwalk would be filled with casinos. That’s exactly what’s happened; there are now plans for more and bigger casinos on the Atlantic City shore, just as there are for Las Vegas, now the most visited vacation spot in the country!
We in Massachusetts have a chance to do casino gambling right– and the best reason in the world for doing so. We are now faced with a huge deficit in the state budget for next year (estimated at $2 billion) just after a ballot question that would have wiped out the state income tax was defeated by just 10 percentage points. I do not think there is going to be much appetite in the General Court to raise taxes again, but cutting spending is almost impossible without cutting Medicaid or local aid or Chapter 70 aid to public schools. I doubt that anyone wants to do that either. Bringing in casino gambling will not solve a $2 billion shortfall, but it will begin to fill the gap.
Look what it has done for Connecticut. The two Indian casinos there, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, contributed $322 million to state coffers last year. With the state taking 25 percent of all slot-machine receipts, casino funding has risen every year, and is on track to reach $400 million this year. According to one study, one-third of Foxwoods patrons are Bay State residents; another 18 percent are Rhode Islanders, for whom New Bedford would be an easier drive than Ledyard. Any way you look at it, a substantial portion of those gaming revenues could be captured for the benefit of Massachusetts.
Most important, from the point of view of immediate fiscal needs, the state could count on a substantial amount of revenue before any casino opened its doors. I believe that the proprietary casinos that have expressed interest in locating in New Bedford– Trump, Park Place (the gaming arm of Hilton Hotels), and Sahara– would be willing to put money up front, to the tune of $350 million, for the right to build in my city. The Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard– which, under federal law, have the right to conduct gambling on their own land, but can locate a gambling establishment on the mainland only if it is allowed under state law– have similar wishes and capacity through their backers. So we could have some spirited bidding for rights to the gambling business in southeastern Massachusetts.
It would be best, for New Bedford and for the Commonwealth, to cash in those rights as soon as possible. In addition to the Connecticut casinos, electronic slot machines in Newport and Lincoln, RI, are luring Massachusetts patrons as well. And it’s only a matter of time before Rhode Island and possibly even New Hampshire go into casino gambling full-bore. That would take this opportunity for Massachusetts to get in on the gambling craze off the table forever.
As Shakespeare said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at their flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” We have seen enough misery caused by the draconian cuts in the state budget necessitated by shortfalls brought on us by 9/11. Let’s put a stop to it. Bring casino gambling to Massachusetts!
George Rogers is a New Bedford city councilor and a former state representative.