Credit where credit is due: Shirley Leung wrote a pretty good column on casinos in yesterday’s Globe, in contrast to the awful one that she wrote a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday’s column mercifully stays away (for the most part) from punditry, and instead supplies some information that is actually quite useful, namely, where most of the candidates for Governor stand on the casino question. Here’s her basic roundup:
most gubernatorial candidates, including Attorney General Martha Coakley, Treasurer Steve Grossman, and Boston venture capitalist Jeffrey McCormick, support legalized gambling — if it’s done right. Or, if you are businessmen Joe Avellone and Evan Falchuk , you don’t believe the state should pass laws one year and repeal them the next. It’s just not good government.
Two other candidates, Charlie Baker and Don Berwick, back repealing the casino law.
So, that’s well worth knowing. There is, unfortunately, an unnecessary swipe at Juliette Kayyem. Leung says:
Only Juliette Kayyem, my ex-Globe colleague and former Obama administration official, wouldn’t get on the phone with me to talk casinos. Apparently, when you’re no longer a columnist you become shy about sharing your opinions.
Well, gosh, Shirley, your phone calls to a busy candidate can’t always be returned before your deadline. Fortunately, Kayyem has not been “shy about sharing” her opinion on casinos in other settings. If you Google “juliette kayyem casino” the first two items that come up are an interview on WGBH radio and a Globe article, both of which make pretty clear that Kayyem, like Coakley, Grossman, and McCormick, basically supports the law as it currently exists. From the Globe:
She said she supports casino gambling in the state, which would be part of the financial landscape for whatever candidate succeeds Patrick.
“Casinos are now a reality for how the state has budgeted for the next 10 years,” she said.
And from WGBH:
I support the revenue that casinos are going to bring. You look at that number- how will we fund public education without casinos? So, people who are for the repeal- you have to say where are we going to get that income?
So, Kayyem’s position on casinos is not exactly a mystery. And dogged reporting by BMG’s crack news team (stated otherwise, a phone call with Matt Patton, Kayyem’s communications director) allows us to add that (a) Kayyem is not taking a position on the effort to repeal the casino law until the SJC rules on whether that question may appear on the ballot, and (b) Kayyem is aligned with Governor Patrick in opposing the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah’s plan to open a casino on Martha’s Vineyard.
Anyway, the best part of Leung’s column is the report on Charlie Baker’s position on the repeal. Here’s what he said:
Charlie Baker … back[s] repealing the casino law. Baker, a Republican and former health insurer chief executive turned venture capitalist, doesn’t think the state can support three resort casinos and a slots parlor….
“I would be for getting on the ballot,” Baker said in an interview. “There should be a go-slow strategy. Why would you presume you could build four or five of these?”
Instead, Baker touts a one-casino plan for the state, something he championed during his unsuccessful run against Patrick in 2010.
This makes zero sense, right? Think about it. Candidate Baker thinks that the state, having accepted a couple million bucks in application fees and put several casino applicants through a grueling process in hopes of getting a license, should repeal the very law that put that whole process into place, thereby presumably strangling all those applications in their cribs and royally pissing off everyone involved in the application process, who will have just seen a lot of money, time, and effort go down the toilet. Then, once he wins, Governor Baker wants the legislature to write a new law, presumably with a new and improved extensive and grueling application process, that would authorize only one casino.
What casino operator in its right mind would want to come to Massachusetts under those circumstances? Is Steve Wynn really going to be lining up to plunk down another half a mil to go through yet another vetting process to apply for the state’s only casino license, having had the rug yanked out from under him last time around just when he was looking like a shoo-in for the eastern license? Seems very unlikely to me. As far as I can see, there are two plausible possibilities: we go forward with the current law, which will ultimately yield somewhere between zero and three resort casinos, or we repeal the whole shebang and go forward without casino gambling in the state.
Except maybe on Martha’s Vineyard. *sigh*
I think that a one-casino process is extremely workable from a technical process. You combine all the applications, and one gets picked instead of one in each region. No new applications, no new fees, no new processes.
I’m not arguing the politics of working with the legislature to pass that bill, but I think that it wouldn’t be too hard to get it done.
As for all the developers who invested money on a plan, only to have the rules change under them? Guess what. No legislature is bound by a previous legislature, and no society is should be forced to live with a bad law. Developing a casino is a calculated risk — a gamble, if you will. Sometimes, you lose. The most important rule of the casino development game is that the house — in this case, the General Court — can change the rules at any time.
Don’t jump to conclusions. That, in fact, is precisely the issue that the SJC will address in deciding whether to allow the repeal on the ballot. The AG’s office concluded that repealing the law would constitute an uncompensated taking of the casino applicants’ property. If the SJC agrees with the AG, then presumably for such a repeal to be legal, the applicants would at least be entitled to a refund of their application fees, which means a couple million dollars. So yes, of course, the General Court can change the rules, but that doesn’t mean that the changes are without significant consequences.
Whether they get a refund if there are no casinos, or a refund if there is one instead of three, would surely be subject to extensive litigation. But consequences or not, there’s no doubt the GC can “change the rules.”
The SJC having ruled that the operators of the dog track had no property right to their license, the AG’s opinion continues to make little sense to me. The AG said, in essence, they have a property right in their expectation of a determination. Under that theory, when combined with the SJC’s precedent, the MGC could grant three licenses and the legislature scrap the whole thing the next day.
let’s not forget that the odds of the legislature itself repealing the casino law, regardless of whether or not that would entail refunds of application fees, are vanishingly small. The only way that law is getting rolled back is via the ballot question, and the SJC has the final say on whether or not that can happen. Generally, I agree that the AG’s opinion was eyebrow-raising, but that doesn’t mean the SJC won’t go along.
We’ll see what the SJC does, and they’ll come up with something to justify their decision, whatever it may be. I still think agreeing with the AG would fit very poorly with their Wonderland decision.
But stomv’s first point was that the applicants live under the possibility of repeal, either by the GC or (potentially) by the voters. Such is the nature of their business. I was merely agreeing with that point, talking about what the legislature could do, not what I think it will do.
it’s not at all obvious to me that every developer who opted to participate in what they thought was a three-casino process would have done so in a one-casino process, since obviously the odds of winning the license are much less good. So, again, if you change the rules, you may end up having to refund some application fees. This is more complicated than you’re making it out to be.
Though the odds would have been greater in a 3 casino process, the one casino process offers the selected developer the exclusive MA casino property*.
* Until they allow another, and another.
that’s trivial in the greater scheme of things. That’s not complicated.
There’s no doubt that there would be lawsuits, and the state may well end up being “guilty” of a taking. That written, if ending up with 3 casinos and ending up with 0 casinos are possibilities, ending up with 1 casino is *also* a possibility.
As I noted upthread, there’s no bloody way that the legislature itself is going to repeal the casino law of its own volition, and that’s the only scenario in which refunds are relevant. If refunds are required, that means that without them a repeal would be a taking, and in that case the ballot question will be disallowed, so refunds are out of the picture. If refunds are not required, then maybe the ballot question can go forward – and if it is successful, one could hardly blame casino applicants for being a tad shy to apply under a new law … which, as soon as it is enacted, will again be the subject of a repeal effort.
You mean casino applicants don’t want to gamble?
The $50k is peanuts. The cost to put together the application probably costs more, and the upside of winning is so high that the $50k is pocket change.
I thought the initial application fee was much higher, like $400K, and with bid review costs exceeding the statutory figures, they were in for millions on each bid.
nt
Indeed not, as I noted in a related context post-Eastie vote.
I read a book once (maybe it was a movie?) where the protagonist is part of the gambling industry. All of the industry characters in the book emphasize the difference between a “dealer” and a “player”.
The most important difference is that a dealer HATES to gamble. A dealer goes to great, sometimes illegal, lengths to avoid taking a gamble. A “player”, on the other hand, lives to gamble. The promise of the payoff is far more appealing than the payoff itself, and the gamble itself is why the player is in the establishment. Dealers are winners. Players are losers.
I think the casino applicants are dealers. I think their bet is that everybody else is, at some level, a player.
I think that the commission, the law, and virtually everything associated with casinos in Massachusetts is a rotten stinking mess. I’m disgusted that Deval Patrick let it get as far as it has.
It’s time to kill casino gambling. I think it will need a stake through the heart and a silver bullet — but I think we MUST kill it. Dead.
for the amusing image of the casinos losing a rigged, or at least slanted, game for once.
It occurs to me I don’t much care if Steve Wynn is appalled by Massachusetts and doesn’t want to come here. Repeal would accomplish the same thing without leaving Steve Wynn any discretion to apply anyway. The point about Baker’s position making little sense is well-taken, though I’m sure there’s someone out there who’d think it’s worth opening the only casino in Massachusetts.
And bad on Kayyem for suggesting we can’t possibly fund our schools without opening our state to these predators. It’s time people governed like grownups instead of looking for the gimmick fix all the time.