FORUM: Doug Muir

Is it too late to halt the expansion of gambling in Maine?

Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Doug Muir of Kittery is a retired federal employee who worked for more than 30 years in the statistical analysis of scientific data. To top of story

The Maine House of Representatives recently imposed a 1 percent tax on the amount wagered at a racino and approved a state-operated system for monitoring slots operations.

When the Legislature reconvenes this week, members will be voting on whether to pass it with the 1 percent, without the 1 percent or to choose nothing at all, which would undo all of Gov. Baldacci's good work putting slots under tight regulation.

Penn National lobbyists said the company strongly opposes both the tax and the monitoring system and will not open a racino in Bangor unless the bill is "reworked."

Frankly, this threat is about as credible as a mugger announcing that he will no longer take Canadian money because of the bad exchange rate.

To be fair, the lobbyists' astonishing statement is fully consistent with the industry's repeated claims that casino-style slot machine gambling is nothing more than a happy combination of entertainment and economic development, and that, in any case, the expansion of gambling cannot be stopped.

But neither of these claims is true. At the beginning of 2003, both the gambling media and gambling analysts predicted a massive expansion of gambling throughout the nation, largely driven by concerns over chronic state budget deficits.

But by year's end, the picture looked very different. In 30 states, 45 different expansions had been proposed, but 42 of them defeated or rejected.

The only three that survived were our own slots facility at Bangor, a lone casino boat on Lake Patoka in Orange County, Indiana, and 10 slot machines in Oregon, a state that already had thousands of slots and video lottery terminals.

Here is a detailed breakdown of the national picture for 2003, provided by the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling:

Slot Machines at Racetracks (19 states "no" vs. 2 "yes") - Slots were defeated in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. They were approved in Maine and expanded slightly in Oregon.

New Casinos (6-0) - They were defeated in Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Hawaii and Maine.

Expanding casinos (6-1) - Allowing more to be built where they already exist failed in Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas and Wisconsin. In Indiana, voters approved the Lake Patoka riverboat.

Lotteries (5-0) - Proposals were disapproved in Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

Convenience Gambling (6-0) - Lottery machines in liquor stores, convenience stores, taverns, supermarkets and the like were defeated in Arkansas, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Alaska and Washington.

Gambling contains the seeds of its own destruction. It continues to fail to solve a state's budget problems. States, like individuals, cannot gamble themselves rich. But they can, and have, gambled themselves poor, as demonstrated by Nevada's $870 million budget deficit in 2003.

Worse, millions of Americans have become pathological and problem gamblers. This increased addiction has brought with it increased bankruptcies and increased crime.

Promoters and politicians have pointed to gambling as a painless revenue stream, but after two decades of widespread gambling, the list of victims is too long to be ignored, the social damage too visible and too painful to be tolerated.

Last year was the year community leaders really began to acknowledge the destructive cost of gambling in their midst. It has become a public health concern.

Meanwhile, gambling itself has been proven fatally flawed, unable to deliver on its promise of economic salvation, and has been unable to maintain its facade as a mere entertainment venue, like sporting events and the movies.

In the political arena, it has fallen to attacks from opposite directions.

On one side, every attempt to expand existing gambling was fought by gambling interests that were already established. Greed versus greed created a spectacle of legislative gridlock that stopped a great deal of proposed gambling expansion.

On the other side, gambling expansion faces a growing army of concerned citizens. They care about good public policy and they want a better quality of life for their communities, their state and their nation.

They are armed with the facts about gambling and filled with commitment. Determined resistance now greets every expansion effort.

With so much money at stake, we have to expect that gambling promoters will try and try again to use their money and political muscle to expand. But 2003 showed that informed citizens have muscle, too.

- Special to the Telegram

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