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Westport Letter: Five Reasons To Kill The Casino Bill

FAIRFIELD, Conn. -- The Fairfield Daily Voice accepts signed letters to the editor. Send letters to fairfield@dailyvoice.com.

State. Sen. Tony Hwang

State. Sen. Tony Hwang

Photo Credit: File

To the editor:

It’s getting hard to keep up with all the attempts to expand casino-type gambling in Connecticut.

Last year, public opposition stopped legislative leaders from putting the gambling game keno in restaurants, bars and convenience stores, and earlier this year a lack of support derailed a proposal by a legislative task force to place video slots in OTB facilities.

Now, the Democratic legislative leadership wants to pass a bill that would allow the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes, owners of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, respectively, to jointly build three commercial (not tribal) satellite casinos in order to fight out-of-state competition.

The tribes want to open the first “convenience” casino along I-91 between Hartford and the Massachusetts border in an effort to keep Connecticut residents from going the new $800 million MGM casino under construction in Springfield.

They reportedly hope to open the other two casinos along I-95 and I-84 in Fairfield County to defend against New York’s casinos. The Hartford area casino would be heavily oriented to slot machines, with up to 2,000 slots and 50 to 75 table games, no entertainment, and limited food and beverages. (There are currently about 5,000 slots and 300 table games at Foxwoods).

The bill’s supporters argue that the new casinos would help both the tribes and the state by slowing the decline in gambling revenue and helping to preserve casinos jobs.

But the bill is a bad one for Connecticut for five reasons: 

  1. The primary economic benefit of Connecticut’s casinos has come from their success in drawing over half their combined customers and billions of dollars from other states. Building new scaled-down casinos in Connecticut will do nothing to bring them back.
  2. While opening convenience casinos would encourage current Connecticut gamblers to stay in state to gamble, it would also encourage them to gamble more frequently and attract thousands of other Connecticut residents to gamble.
  3. There is a growing body of research on the negative effects of casino gambling’s spread. According to a recent landmark report by the nonpartisan Institute for American Values, a leading think tank, the new local and regional casinos drain wealth from communities, prey on low-income people, weaken nearby businesses, hurt property values and reduce civic participation, family stability and other forms of social capital that are at the heart of a successful society. 
  4. In blatant disregard for Connecticut voters, the new casino bill makes no provision for residents of proposed host towns to vote on whether they want a casino in their community, but simply gives the municipality’s legislative body the power to make this far-reaching decision.
  5. Just over a decade ago, Connecticut demonstrated its opposition to more casinos by repealing the charity gaming law that opened the door to our two current Indian casinos, and then mounted a successful effort to keep its other tribes from gaining federal recognition and the right to open casinos.

Passage of the new casino bill would make a mockery of the state’s argument that it opposes more casinos and would destroy its ability to win that fight.

More casinos are not an answer to Connecticut’s economic problems.

Instead of encouraging our citizens to gamble away their savings, we need to attract productive, living-wage jobs, promote stable revenue streams and end the runaway spending that’s put the state so deeply in debt. 

Robert Steele and Tony Hwang 

Robert Steele of Essex was a U.S. representative from Eastern Connecticut and is author of “The Curse: Big-Time Gambling’s Seduction of a Small New England Town.”

State Sen. Tony Hwang, of Fairfield, is an assistant Senate minority leader, representing Easton, Fairfield, Newtown, Weston and Westport.

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