Globe looks to Connecticut for gambling impact

In preparation for next week’s extravaganza down in Middleborough, the Globe ran an interesting article today on the impact seen in small Connecticut towns when Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun arrived, and also sampled some views in Middleborough.

The article about Connecticut is long and worth reading in full.  My takeaway from it is this: yes, of course casinos brought more traffic, more calls to the police, and more arrests for drunk driving and the like.  But in the great scheme of things, not really all that much.  I’d like to see the numbers for a community that adds, say, a football stadium.

Here’s some of what the big article reports.

Over the last six years, calls to the Ledyard Police Department, a short drive from the Foxwoods Resort Casino, have almost tripled, according to local authorities. And in Montville, where Mohegan Sun is located, calls to police are up 38 percent overall since 1997. Arrests for drunken driving have risen in both towns — up from 38 to 87 in Ledyard since 1991 and from 39 to 113 in Montville since 1997. But the big reason for the increase in police calls, according to both departments, is not casino-related vices, but the sheer volume of people passing through these towns every day, creating more opportunities for problems just by being there.

Here are some additional numbers, also from the Globe story:

More arrests?  Sure, though I wouldn’t exactly call a jump of 20 or so drug arrests a year an epidemic. 

Here’s the other side of the coin:

The two Connecticut casinos say they attract, on average, a combined 70,000 people every day — and the crowds have not been all bad. In the 15 years since the first casino opened, unemployment rates have plummeted. Roughly 27,000 jobs have been created in the region since 1992 for a job growth rate that is more than double the statewide figure. And in the early years, with Connecticut’s submarine industry laying off locals by the thousand, the casinos saved many families, said Grace Horne , a former Mohegan Sun employee who helped hire people when the casino first opened.

“At first, people were looking for jobs that paid the type of wage they had been making in the past,” said Horne, now an office manager in Groton, Conn. “But they realized those were not the jobs at the casino. And they were happy to have jobs at substantially less wages so they could have benefits and medical coverage for their families.”

So, perhaps not surprisingly, there is truth in what both the proponents and the opponents are saying.  Casinos do create jobs and generate revenues for their host communities.  And they do result in increased traffic, calls to the police, and crime.  The big question is how to balance the pros and the cons.  And again, at least from today’s articles, it’s not obvious to me that the negative impact generated by the casino is any different in kind or in degree than what you’d see with any facility that generates that amount of increased traffic.  In other words, it may not be that it’s a casino, it may just be that it’s a lot more people in the area, and people sometimes get into trouble.  But I could be wrong.

Here’s an interesting tidbit, by the way.

This agreement [between Middleborough and the Wampanoags], which would pay the town $11 million annually and about $250 million for one-time infrastructure upgrades, will help Middleborough prepare for the changes to come. It calls for the Wampanoag tribe to, among other things, pay for the hiring of eight police officers and 16 emergency medical technicians. And the funding for such changes will position the town better than its Connecticut counterparts. Ledyard, where Foxwoods opened in February 1992, has no deal with the Mashantucket Pequot tribe while Montville, where Mohegan Sun opened in the neighborhood of Uncasville in October 1996, receives just $500,000 a year.

So Middleborough cut a better deal for itself than did the Connecticut towns.  Is that enough?

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