Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994 TAG: 9405160028
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COLONIAL BEACH LENGTH: Long
In February, Tom and Penny Flanagan transformed their ailing offshore restaurant into an off-track betting parlor. On May 7, they stood back and watched almost a thousand people stampede the doors to wager on the Kentucky Derby.
Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Hampton, Richmond and a handful of counties have passed referendums authorizing off-track betting, but they can't get a facility until someone builds a racetrack. That could be next year. It could be later.
Meanwhile, the state of Maryland and the science of cartography have smiled on Colonial Beach, a faded Potomac River resort town near Fredericksburg.
The way the map is drawn, if you step off the sand and into the river at Colonial Beach, you're suddenly in Maryland. Put a building on a pier, and that building's in Maryland.
In Maryland they tend to have, shall we say, looser laws than in the Old Dominion.
Gambling was legal there in the 1950s, and casinos sprouted on piers along the Colonial Beach waterfront. In the late 1970s, before Virginia had Lotto, a pier/shop at Colonial Beach was the single most lucrative outlet for the Maryland lottery.
Last year, Maryland started awarding off-track betting licenses. The Flanagans, in that hallowed tradition of bringing Maryland's fast lane to the great Virginia bike path, saw wagering as the way to resurrect what had become a gloomy restaurant business. O Now many of the 3,500 residents of Colonial
Beach see the Flanagans' "Riverboat on the Potomac" as a step toward resurrecting their town.
"It's been a tremendous amount of people coming in. Most have been upper-middle class, and they're showing a lot of interest in our town," said Bob Swink of Colonial Beach Real Estate. "I really think that off-track betting is the first step in the right direction."
Riverboat on the Potomac is a rambling gray building on pilings over the river. It has three satellite dishes on the roof and a fourth on the way. Fifty television screens flicker inside with galloping horseflesh, six days a week. Sixteen neatly uniformed tellers wait to take bets.
There are two lounges with bars; a sit-down restaurant; a Maryland lottery and Keno room; a pinball arcade; a private liquor store (something else that isn't permitted in this state); and, just inside the entrance before you cross the state line, a single window offering the Virginia Lottery.
More than 500 people can fit here. On a recent Thursday, the gravel parking lot began filling up shortly after noon, pickups and mid-size American cars jockeying for shade for their stay into the evening.
The gravel lot and the fields of weeds on either side once were the hub of a thriving river resort. There were dance halls, a grand hotel, theaters, game rooms, restaurants and carnival rides. Now the town owns the vacant property and wants to redevelop it.
"They want a sort of quiet, primarily residential, preserve-the-riverfront, very passive type of development," said Town Manager Jerry W. Davis.
Riverboat is not passive. Trucks come and go, delivering seafood, supplies and beverages. It stays open on weekends until the wee hours. But Davis said there have been no problems for the town's seven police officers.
Apparently there have been no problems for other merchants, either, apart from the occasional bad bet.
"Weeellllll, I come down oncet or twicet a week. I can walk here in 10 minutes," drawled Lenny Skeens, his gear laid out on the bar: racing form, program, cup of pencils, cup of orange juice (with vodka). Skeens owns the nearby Lenny's Restaurant, open for breakfast and lunch.
He says Riverboat has juiced his business, with folks stopping by to gamble on his eggs and coffee before playing the ponies.
It also, of course, has juiced his hobby. He used to have to drive two or three hours into Maryland to bet on horse racing.
Jack Ehrmantraut also wore out the pavement going to Maryland to gamble, driving several hours a day from his home in Fredericksburg, where he retired after owning an optical shop. Since Riverboat opened, he has come to Colonial Beach five days a week.
Gambling is Ehrmantraut's second career. He shows up with a binder containing the latest analysis of times and odds - or "probability and value" - generated by his home computer. He will wager only on a race for which his analysis gives better odds than the track. He wins precisely 38 bets out of 100.
Like most of the generally white-haired crowd at Riverboat, Ehrmantraut passes the afternoon quietly, divided between his racing guides and the ceiling-hung television sets.
A few glitches still plague the system. The 1 p.m. post time gets under way with the national anthem. Chairs scrape tile as everyone stands to face the handiest tele-spangled banner. Three times, the signal fades and leaves nothing but static, punctuated by the occasional shudder from a warhead being test-fired at the nearby Navy base.
The Flanagans get their signal by contract from the Laurel and Pimlico racetracks in Maryland, like a franchisee getting burger basics from McDonald's Central. If Virginia ever gets off-track betting, its system will be different. Each satellite facility will have to be owned by whoever builds the racetrack. That's why, even though the concept is approved, off-track A betting can't come yet to any of those cities that want it.
That bugs the living daylights out of Lloyd Armstrong, a painting contractor from Richmond. He and his wife hop up to Colonial Beach two or three times a week, sometimes while the kids are in school or sometimes leaving the kids in the pinball arcade.
"A lot of people are really [upset] about not getting off-track betting in Virginia. Why wait two more years?" Armstrong said. "Everything that goes through the till here, we're giving the money to Maryland. You understand what I'm saying? Why should we be paying higher taxes, when we could have this revenue?"
The Flanagans average about $50,000 in wagers a day, and expect that to rise sharply after Memorial Day.
They couldn't have imagined this success 2 1/2 years ago when they bought the restaurant to complement a nightclub they own at the other end of the beach.
"We thought it was a mistake, at first," said Penny Flanagan, who spends virtually every conscious moment at Riverboat. "We were going to get into something else, or get out. Then off-track betting came along."
Now they have 51 employees on the restaurant staff, 22 betting tellers and 10 security guards. When sunbathing season arrives, they count on being swamped.
But two or three years down the road, who knows? Virginia might open a network of competing parlors, and Riverboat's novelty could wear off.
"I'll have to cross that bridge when I get to it," Tom Flanagan said. "I really don't know what will happen to us."
In the meantime, they'll ride the luck of the moment. They're the only game in town.
Keywords:
HORSE RACING NOTE: STRIP
by CNB