Lexington & Other Cities: Vote NO on KEEP's Casino Plan

Today's Intercom contains the letter that I sent yesterday to the Lexington City Council, who will tonight (Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005), vote to endorse the proposals of the Kentucky Equine Education Project's (KEEP) for casino gambling in Kentucky. KEEP is chaired by former Governor Brereton C. Jones. KEEP wants a constitutional amendment that will: 1) authorize full casinos at Kentucky racetracks; 2) will prohibit proliferation of casinos; 3) will designate where the tax proceeds from such operations would be expended. Jones claims he doesn't want it unless it is good for Kentucky.

As most of my readers know, the Council has been engaged in opposing expansion of gambling, at racetracks or elsewhere, since the early 1990s. I urge my Lexington readers especially to call their City Council Representative before today's meeting to urge them to vote "NO" on the resolution to endorse the KEEP casino proposal.

KEEP's new campaign, "Keep It In Kentucky", is a gross misnomer: We will experience a doubling or more of per capita participation rate in casino gambling; a doubling or more of gambling addictions with all the incumbent costs; and most of the money will still go out of state to the stockholders of the racetracks and the companies that operate the casinos, most of which are based in Nevada. What I said in my letter, below, to Lexington Council members is applicable to every other town or city in Kentucky with a racetrack.

To support casino gambling in Kentucky, and especially in Lexington, is to succumb to the lure of fool's gold. If you believe it will mean economic benefits for Lexington, then I'd like to sell you a bridge. I believe that it would be the worst mistake ever for our city. Let me enumerate several sound reasons to oppose the proposals of KEEP.

First, whenever a society decides to remove "fences" that it has previously installed around particular activities, we should think why the fences were put up in previous generations. We need also to ask ourselves, before taking such a step, what kind of society we want to endow upon our children and our children's children, what kind of world?

The reason that gambling casinos were previously restricted to places like Nevada, where there was no existing economy, is that gambling is a predatory economic enterprise: it cannibalizes discretionary dollars from consumers. Some of the states with the worst fiscal crises are those with casinos. Where is the fix? The only communities that have benefited from casinos are those communities that had no vibrant economy to begin with.

Second, do you really believe that other businesses will want to move to a casino city? It hasn't worked in any other locality in the nation. They do not want to move to casino cities because of the high degree of addiction that results, with incumbent losses to businesses ranging from lost days at work to the worst case scenario of embezzlement. In cities with casinos the only new businesses were an exponential increase in the numbers of pawn shops.


The normal rate of pathological gambling is 1-2% of the adult population. Detroit now confesses to an addiction rate of 11%. In Biloxi and Tunica, the addiction rate is 5%. Multiply the adult population of Lexington times those percentages, then multiply it times the annual average cost of a single pathological gambler (from $10,300 - $13,000), and you might begin to see that casinos are losing propositions.

Third, no U.S. city with a casino ranks high in terms of "quality of life". For me, casinos and slots parlors and cities that have them are tacky, tawdry, and without class or imagination. I was born in Lexington and have always been proud to call it my home: it is a "class-act" kind of place to live. Our city was originally called the "Athens of the West", and our institutions were equal to the Ivy League colleges. University of Kentucky President Lee Todd wants to make the university one of the top-20 public universities in the nation, but casinos are enemical to the purposes of education. Casinos argue to consumers that life is luck; and you might as well win. Of course, the house always wins.

Do you want a casino right smack next to our university? Every year, university administrators in Mississippi have to warn parents of their students not to give their children an entire semester's worth of funds, but to parcel out their financial support to their young student a week or a month at a time. Why? They discovered that the students were gambling away their money within the first month of each semester. Electronic forms of gambling are the fastest growing addiction among young adults.

Casinos constitute a cultural blight wherever they are allowed to exist and proliferate. Although KEEP says that they believe in non-proliferation, no state has ever been able to stop the proliferation once the door was opened. Just ask the people of South Carolina who finally got rid of them in their state after years of enduring their cancerous spread throughout their communities. I've heard the one-time city manager of Colorado City, Jack Hidahl, say: "I'd tell anyone who was thinking of opening their community to casino gambling to have his head examined." Why? Because, he says, "we lost our town, our community, our neighbors. It's just not the same place anymore."

Fourth, the numbers of dollars that KEEP talks about are hypothetical, while I can promise you that the social costs will keep growing. Each compulsive gambler negatively impacts 15 other people. That's 15 other people-students who will have trouble at school, family members or spouses who will worry about whether they are going to lose their house or worse. According to Harrah's own figures, the average rate of "participation in casino gambling" overall for Kentucky is only 16%, while it is closer to double that in Northern Kentucky and Louisville, cities with riverboats in their backyards. Putting casinos in Kentucky will mean that the entire state can expect a doubling of participation rates in gambling, a doubling of the current social costs of gambling.

The money does not fall out of the sky. There is only a finite sum of money in an economy at any one time. Casinos do not make money grow on trees. In order to generate the $400 million that KEEP suggests the state will receive, people will have to gamble $1.29 BILLION dollars. That means $1.29 billion will not be spent on other things in Kentucky: groceries; trips to the doctor and dentist; entertainment; education, books.

Finally, let me say that I love horses, and I love the beauty of the animal and the horse farms in our area. But here's the thing: I love the people of our state, our children, and the quality of our life far more. We can find more creative ways to support the horse industry without destroying the quality of life in our city.

Please do not vote to endorse KEEP's proposals. At least postpone your decision to investigate this matter far more closely.