Boards right to shape racinos

Sunday, February 8, 2004

COLUMN: Nancy Grape

As Maine Democrats prepare to make their choices for president today, nagging homegrown questions cloud our state's horizon.

Here's a sampling:

How many Maine voters who went to the polls in November meant to give significant control of legalized gambling in this state to a largely unknown regulatory board - the Maine Harness Racing Commission?

Assuming that you don't own race horses or drive them, can you name a decision the state harness racing commission made, before November, that affected your life in any way whatsoever?

Coming right down to it, can you name any member - let alone all five - of this state board that, for now at least, holds much of legalized gambling in its hands?

Do you have any idea what state government department the harness racing commission falls under? Here's a clue - in the dog-eared directory I consulted, the commission is listed between public service and pesticide control.

OK, so much for that. Let's move on to the Legislature.

How many times have you been riveted to news being made by lawmakers on the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee?

Let me suggest that now may be a good time to start. Like the harness racing commission, the 13-member Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee has moved front and center on the gambling scene. It's the committee studying reforms to the racino law, slated to go into effect Feb. 21.

AND ONE LAST question: How do you feel about the sludgy politics being played with this peck of trouble called racinos, all in your name?

This newspaper, as we've seen, is sufficiently concerned to advocate editorially that Mainers ought to start over, that voters should ballot on the racino question again. Gov. Baldacci wants significant reforms. Lawmakers have their own ideas. And entrepreneurs and racehorse owners, who stand to make money off the slots, want everyone to leave a promising source of revenue alone. That, they contend, is how Mainers want it.

True, the players in this racino drama, whether from our own Legislature or from Pennyslvania and points west, don't talk about you and me, one by one. They talk instead about "the will of the people." By that, they mean the statewide 53 percent to 47 percent approval that racinos won at the ballot box last fall.

"The will of the people" is a noble phrase, or at least it can be when it is related to a noble cause - choosing a presidential candidate as some Mainers are doing today, preserving scenic lands or safeguarding people's civil rights. But racinos? Where's the nobility in placing thousands of one-armed bandits at an existing Bangor track and somewhere else that can be called a "racetrack" by stretching the truth from Scarborough to Southport?

Week in, week out, since the votes were counted three months ago, the racino story has oozed sludge. It may not mark the least-appealing chapter in Maine's public life, but it's rapidly becoming a contender.

And if that is how the story starts - before a single slot machine is up and running at Bangor Raceway - where is it going to end? That question should give us all pause.

Baldacci is right to want effective regulations and regulators firmly in place before any slot machines come to Bangor or anywhere else.

The governor is not "subverting the will of the people," as state Rep. Gary Moore, R-Standish, a member of the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee, recently contended. He is doing what a governor should do - acting in the public interest. So should a responsible legislative committee and state commission.

The public mandate that undergirds lawmakers and regulators is different from - and larger than - the impetus that drives a private group such as the Citizens Committee for the Revitalization of the Historic Bangor Raceway. That private group recently commissioned a telephone poll of 400 Mainers that reported nearly 61 percent declared the racino law should stay in effect as passed.

That's about as big a surprise as finding a penny toy in a Cracker Jack box. Why? Because the answers pollsters get depend upon the questions they ask.

"It was about the citizen initiative process. That's what the folks came to us with, asking us to do a poll about the process. It wasn't a poll about 'do you favor or oppose racinos or casinos?,' " Patrick Murphy, president of Strategic Marketing Services, which conducted the poll, subsequently told the Press Herald.

It's a comment worth pondering. Yet you can bet - indeed, we've seen it already - that backers of slots at the Bangor track will promote that 61 percent figure as the will of the people, ready and eager to support slot machines at racetracks down to the last ka-ching.

And this is only one of the ways the November referendum is being manipulated.

FOR HIS PART, Baldacci wants effective oversight of racinos enacted before, not after, the racino law becomes effective, scheduled for Feb. 21.

He proposes a Gambling Control Board be created to license and regulate the gaming machines, rather than leaving those responsibilities with the harness racing commission. So far, some of the commission members have been reluctant to see things his way.

The result has been a tug of war that could come to a head at a scheduled commission meeting Wednesday.

Calls for voters to revisit the racino issue make sense. But no groundswell for that approach is apparent so far. That makes oversight by elected officials all the more important. The "will of the people" doesn't surface only in referendums. It surfaces in the vote totals of every governor and state lawmaker Maine elects.

Those elected officials have a job to do.

- Nancy Grape (e-mail: spargrape@msn.com) comments on state and national issues for the Maine Sunday Telegram.

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