A proposition intended to overturn New York’s constitutional ban on casino-style gambling will be on the November ballot — described by Gov. Cuomo as a linchpin component in his economic-development strategy for upstate.
Yet it is no strategy, but rather a charade.
The ballot measure, Cuomo says, will promote economic growth and tourism in New York — and “end the trend of letting neighboring states with legalized gaming take revenue that should be going to our schools.”
Translation: Let’s have a casino cannibal war!
Because there don’t appear to be enough gamblers to go around.
Nationally, big-casino pioneers Nevada and New Jersey have legalized forms of Internet gambling — a sure sign of that a once-successful business model is now faltering. And Delaware did the same this month.
And the states surrounding New York — Cuomo’s prime targets — are experiencing lean times at the tables. All save Vermont permit gambling — but Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut has been flirting with bankruptcy for some time.
Atlantic City’s woes are legend — just check out the nearby slums. Indeed, Pennsylvania’s no-frills casinos seem to have just bankrupted one Boardwalk casino — but even they aren’t pulling in the revenues that were projected for them. Ditto in Massachusetts, whose three casinos are just coming online.
Cuomo’s plan, he says, is to “establish world-class destination gaming resorts to attract tourists to upstate New York.”
Precisely where upstate is top-secret. Cuomo’s calling for casinos near Albany, Binghamton and in the Catskills — plus eventually three more for New York City — all of which will supposedly draw customers from what the governor terms “the 50 million tourists who visit New York every year.”
Which is silly on its face. Anyone who thinks cash-flush foreign players will flock to, say, Binghamton for fun and games is either pipe-dreaming or hasn’t driven north on Route 17 in the past 50 years or so.
Nor does upstate lack for gambling “destinations” now. Indians run casinos near Syracuse and Buffalo, and Albany has already licensed nine race-track video casinos. (And its lottery games — particularly the insidious Quick Draw — vacuum up loose betting dollars everywhere else.)
More fundamentally, does state-sponsored gambling generate wealth in the first place? Is it a good bet for government?
Casino pots are cut many times before a bettor sees a buck. On any given day, some will walk away flush, but over time only casino proprietors and the taxman wind up winners.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not wealth creation, either. It is, at best, wealth redistribution.
Certainly new casinos will produce sugar highs for public education — the ostensible beneficiary of Cuomo’s gambling proposal — which explains why teachers unions are for it, along with construction unions, some business leaders and the usual spendthrift politicians.
But sugar highs don’t last.
That’s why it’s so hard to see the proposal as anything other than a pig-in-a-poke, meant largely to obscure Cuomo’s sparse progress with upstate economic development — a distraction from his obdurate refusal to permit development of the Southern Tier’s fabulously promising natural gas fields via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Upstaters who consider the governor’s wisp of a gambling proposal to be sufficient should look across the Pennsylvania border for evidence of what environmentally sound, but nevertheless aggressive, fracking can do for a local economy.
That border effectively bisects the sprawling Marcellus Shale natural-gas reservoir. On the Pennsylvania side, billions have been invested in gas extraction; on the New York side, bupkis.
The result:
— Pennsylvania officials report that Marcellus Shale development generated $11.2 billion for the state’s GDP in 2010, producing $1.1 billion in state and local tax revenue and supporting some 140,000 jobs — paying on average $62,000 a year. That’s without a hint of significant environmental damage.
— New York officials continue a shameful three-year-plus stall on gas-extraction approvals — with no end in sight. (As for casino-revenue estimates, Cuomo’s office had none yesterday.)
Scranton, 50 miles down I-81 from the New York border, experiences relative prosperity. But on any given morning in Binghamton, 11 miles north of the line on that same highway, you can roll a bowling ball down the main drag and not hit much of anything.
That’s true for much of upstate — and three gambling casinos, even if ragingly successful, aren’t going to change much.
The fundamental issue here is fake economic development vs. actual economic development. Cuomo is promoting the former because he lacks the political courage to pursue the latter.
And no number of casinos will change that.