The riverboat gambling is about as murky as the big rivers which the floating casinos are supposed to ride on.
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Bolivar Herald-Free Press
Editorial
Hamilton: Conflicting principles muddy riverboat gambling issue
07/21/2004
The riverboat gambling is about as murky as the big rivers which the floating casinos are supposed to ride on.
In a 1992 referendum election, 63 percent of Missourians who bothered to go to the polls favored riverboat gambling on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Language of the ballot conjured images of Brett Maverick-style riverboat gamblers gathered around card tables in the parlors of 19th Century sternwheelers on "excursions" up and down Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
What emerged as the vision became reality, however, were floating casinos permanently moored on the rivers or in basin pools. A decade after the first such casino opened, the Missouri Gaming Commission has issued 12 licenses to 11 casinos in Kansas City, St. Louis, St. Charles, Boonville, Caruthersville, La Grange, Maryland Heights, North Kansas City and Riverside.
Though these gaming establishments have generated millions in revenues without producing a single, tangible product, they represent huge tax dollars for the state. A recent article in the Kansas City Star credited the casinos with paying $1.6 billion in taxes, as well as creating 10,000 jobs.
The darker side of those numbers was revealed in that report and another from the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. The Star reported total losses to players at $1.33 billion, and the Lawrence newspaper calculated that Kansas Citians are losing about $2 million a day in the casinos, with an average loss of more than $58 a person for every visit.
How those losses contribute to divorces, suicides, job losses and other societal ills is hard to track, but for some folks, gambling is as addictive and as destructive as alcohol.
But it still represents jobs and money, and that's what the proponents of gambling on the White River at Rockaway Beach are looking at - a return to the prosperity that resort town had before Lake Taneycomo turned cold.
From a personal perspective, gambling is not a muddy issue at all. I don't go to the existing casinos and I wouldn't patronize one in Rockaway Beach.
I've seen the landscapes of two of my favorite vacation states - South Dakota and New Mexico - blighted by casinos and gaming machines. I don't like it
I stand, in principle, with just about everyone who opposes gaming on the White River.
But it's "principle" that muddies the water, too.
We've already compromised our principles by allowing riverboat gambling on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. As wrong as they may be in their expectations, it hardly seems consistent that we would deny gambling proponents the same privilege in other parts of the state.
It's a door I wish we'd never opened.
I just don't know which axiom to follow: "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," or "two wrongs don't make a right."
If gambling is bad for Rockaway Beach and Taney County - and I'm not arguing that it isn't - then why is it okay for folks who live in Kansas City, St. Louis and other urban areas? Do we assume that those "big city" folks are already so sullied by vice that one more is no big deal?
The answer, of course, is that it's not okay, and we can't undo what's been done in other parts of the state. But we can prevent a part of the Ozarks from becoming a local Las Vegas.
Yet it still seems like we're talking out of both sides of our mouths.
