Gambling interests converge on N.Y. to hear growth plans

Mary Esch

Thursday, April 11, 2002 | 9:52 a.m.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Civic leaders extolled the economic virtues of casinos as gambling industry representatives and investors networked at New York's first "gaming summit," sponsored by an industry trade publisher.

"Most of the gaming industry views New York state as the most significant growth market of the future," said Stephen Gibbs, marketing director for GEM Communications, publisher of the industry's leading trade magazines and producer of gaming conferences and trade shows nationwide.

"We are hopeful that the future of Indian gaming in New York is now," Kim Sinatra, executive vice president for Nevada-based Park Place Entertainment Corp., said. The company has a deal with the St. Regis Mohawks to build a casino at the former Kutsher's Hotel in the Catskills, pending state and federal approval.

Gov. George Pataki and the state Legislature approved legislation last year authorizing one of the largest expansions of gambling in New York history.

The legislation, which gambling opponents are challenging in court as unconstitutional, allows for the addition of up to six Indian-owned casinos in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region and the Catskills. It also allows video lottery terminals at horse racing tracks across the state.

Organizers of Tuesday's gaming summit anticipated about 200 attendees, and were surprised when 336 registered, Gibbs said. About half were from New York. The rest were from 22 states, including California, Texas, Nevada, Florida, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as Canada.

A conference room at the Desmond Hotel was crammed with slot machine manufacturers, casino developers, racetrack operators, investment firms, regulators, and 67 major construction companies. There were also representatives from the Mohawk and Oneida Indian Nations, which hope to build casinos in the Catskills and western New York, and economic development leaders from those regions.

At a session on gambling's social and economic impact, Niagara Falls casino proponent Frank Roma said New York residents currently spend more than $2 billion on out-of-state gaming. His economically stressed city watches tourists flock to Casino Niagara on the Canadian side of the falls, he said.

After the casino opened, tourist spending in the Canadian city rose from $169 million a year to $1.2 billion, said Roma, chairman of Niagara Citizens for Casino Development. "We expect a casino on this side to create over 3,000 jobs paying at least $26,000 plus benefits," Roma said. "It would reduce unemployment from 13.3 percent to 2 percent."

Sen. Frank Padavan, who is a party to the lawsuit challenging the new gambling legislation, has called its supposed economic benefits "fool's gold," outweighed by social costs. The Queens Republican says increased access to gambling leads to increases in depression, bankruptcy, domestic violence and suicide.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gaming and one of the conference panelists, said some of the revenue from casinos must be invested in prevention and treatment of gambling addictions. Prevention education should start at the fifth grade level because that's when problem gamblers typically begin, Whyte said.

To those who object to gambling from a moral standpoint, several panelists said it's immoral to allow people to live in poverty, which also generates social ills. "We have prostitution, drugs. If we had jobs, a lot of these social problems would go away," Roma said.

"When people raise the question of whether gambling is moral or immoral, we say the economic good it brings far outweighs any negative impact," Steve Batzer, who served on New Jersey's state advisory commission on gambling, said.

"We see the economic potential of gaming propelling our people into a vast array of opportunity," Lorraine White, general counsel for the St. Regis Mohawks, said. "We will truly have the ability to not only claim sovereignty, but to exercise it."