Unfortunately, for people who really, really want casinos in Massachusetts (mainly developers), it seems like the longer this issue lingers, the more people who become against it. Why? Behind all the terse details, what becomes clear is that casinos in Massachusetts makes for bad social policy, bad economic policy and a bad future for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
All of that became very clear tonight with the first presenter out of the bunch, a very nice woman who just happens to be a veteran of this issue, having served on the planning committee and in various other roles in the very town Foxwoods currently resides. She saw her town go from a safe, sleepy town of 15,000 people “where no one locked their doors,” to a place with the 5th highest crime rate in all of Connecticut. Time after time again, trusted, valued citizens of the town started to embezzle hundreds of thousands as the allure of beeping and flashing slot machines began to take over. Connecticut went from having one state-funded gambling addiction treatment center to 17. She became so frustrated losing her home town that she wanted to flee the whole casino issue, moving to Massachusetts. Now she’s fighting it all over again.
The next presenter was me – and I’ll assume a lot of BMG’s readers know my schtik. I stuck mainly to the economic reasons of why casinos don’t jive with a high society, but I also peppered in some of the personal reasons on why this issue is so important to me. Beyond jobs and numbers and revenue debates, there’s my family trip I took to California and Nevada about a year ago. I drove through half of Nevada and saw it all: the beautiful, extravagent, glittering Las Vegas, as well as the depressing ghost towns with nothing but empty casinos. Talk about diminishing returns. I also spent time rebuking
