BOSTON (AP) — When the House voted to kill Gov. Deval Patrick's plan to license three casinos in Massachusetts, it did not end the gambling debate; it merely refocused it.
The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe continues to plod through the federal process to build its own casino in Middleborough. And the deal that killed the Patrick plan in the House included a promise to let members debate a proposal to place slot machines at the state's four racetracks. The issue is whether those proposals will have less regulation and taxpayer benefit than Patrick's casino plan, and more in the way of social ills.
Patrick insists that when he sat down last year to consider casino gambling in Massachusetts, he expected to end up opposing it. Over time and through study, though, he came to believe it was inevitable. After all, 38 states have casino gambling of some sort.
The governor concluded the best course was to legalize casinos in Massachusetts in a way that tried to minimize the potential problems while maximizing the potential returns. That philosophy girded his proposal to license three casinos, give Indians an advantage in bidding for one of the licenses and use the process to generate at least $600 million in licensing fees, $400 million in annual tax revenues and 20,000 permanent jobs.
While Patrick's projection of 30,000 temporary construction jobs was exposed as overreaching — the actual number was likely to be about a third that — a study by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce bore out his other financial projections and found he may have been conservative in some respects.
For example, while the governor set the minimum license bid at $200 million, a similar auction in Illinois in 2004 — for that state's 10th casino license, not one of just three — yielded a $518-million licensing fee.
The projected $400 million in tax revenues, meanwhile, came after money was taken off the top of the gross gambling receipts for a variety of causes — including 2.5 percent to treat gambling-related problems, and 2.5 percent to address the casinos' impact on their host community and its neighbors.
Days after the bill died in the House, the Wampanoags gathered in Middleborough for a federal public hearing about their plan to build a casino on 539 acres the tribe bought in the southeastern Massachusetts community. Over the next six months, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is expected to review the tribe's application to put the Middleborough land in a federal trust. If the Department of Interior does so, the tribe would be free to build a casino on its sovereign territory — but without the revenue-sharing plan included in Patrick's proposal.
At the same time, Rep. David Flynn, D-Bridgewater, continues to push a bill proposing to license 2,500 slot machines at the state's four tracks. It would require licensing fees of at least $50 million — a quarter of what Patrick's bill demanded — and the attendant jobs increase was projected in the hundreds, not the thousands. Flynn estimates the annual tax revenues at $400 million, but with little backup.
House Speaker DiMasi has been noticeably circumspect about the bill, but both Flynn and Rep. Richard Ross, R-Wrentham, who switched a key vote to help kill the casino bill, said the speaker told them he would allow the slots proposal to come to the floor for a vote. That could happen within months.
The governor shakes his head at this next possible chapter in the state's gambling debate.
"There's nothing from what I have read and studied on this subject that indicates that we would get the economic upside or the job creation from slots at the tracks," he noted last week. "And, by the way, there are some indications that the social costs are greater."
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Glen Johnson has covered local, state and national politics since 1985. He can be reached at glenjohnson@ap.org
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