Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 3, 1995 TAG: 9502030045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Proponents' promises of 24,000 new jobs, and more than $123 million annually in new state and local revenue, may tempt some Virginians. But those promises are less than they seem.
Virginia needs economic development. It doesn't need casino gambling, for reasons that go beyond the sleaze factor.
Gambling reshuffles rather than creates wealth. To the extent it has value, it is only in its ability to entertain and amuse.
While on that point gambling may not be much different from, say, tourism, tourism's attractiveness as an economic sector to nourish is based partly on the relatively few societal costs that it imposes. Gambling, however, fosters an atmosphere of crime and corruption, and promotes the view that citizens need not rely on their own efforts and initiative to fulfill their hopes for prosperity.
Atlantic City's crime rate tripled in the five years after the casinos arrived in 1978. A New Jersey commission on gambling also determined that while organized crime had been kept out of casino ownership, it had infiltrated businesses and labor unions serving the casinos.
Let no one be fooled: Licensing seven floating casinos in the Hampton Roads and Richmond areas, if approved in a statewide referendum, likely wouldn't be the end of it. For how long would casino interests pushing the bill be content with a handful of riverboats of limited capacity for gamblers?
The premise that casinos would lure thousands of new out-of-state visitors, many of whom would stay on to visit other areas in Virginia, is open to question. How many Virginians on gambling junkets to Atlantic City bother to visit the rest of New Jersey?
Cheap food and booze, to keep customers happily gambling away their money, is a traditional feature of casinos. Nearby restaurants and other businesses could well see their profits shrink. At the least, this possibility partly offsets gambling proponents' rosy revenue projections.
Legislative sponsors promise to earmark a portion of the state's revenue from riverboat casinos for economic development and special projects, including in Western Virginia. But if they are good projects, they should be funded through regular channels; if they aren't, they shouldn't be funded at all.
Finally, there is a question here of - well, if not of morality, then of the intangible values that Virginians hold dear. If economic development were only a matter of jobs and revenues, why not legalize prostitution or license purveyors of child pornography?
No, gambling isn't as injurious as prostitution or child pornography. But riverboat gambling would force some compromise in Virginia values, and it would take a better economic argument than any we've seen to make the compromise worth it.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB