Volunteers lining up to promote R.I. casino

Michael Mello

Tuesday, June 8, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.

WEST WARWICK, R.I. -- Two nights a week after work waiting tables, Debbie Kiselica joins other volunteers at the Main Street headquarters of Harrah's Entertainment and the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Using cue cards with project highlights, they call residents around the state to conduct informal telephone polls on a proposed $600 million casino, and to spread promises of jobs and tax revenue that have been echoing through this old mill town for five years.

Kiselica's casino dream is not to strike it rich playing slots, but to get a decent job. "I've been in the (restaurant) business for 30 years, none had benefits," the Scituate mother of two said.

Voters this year could be asked to choose between the project's promise -- thousands of jobs and an economic infusion for a blue-collar town and a struggling tribe -- and opponents' pleas to not expand gambling.

It's a debate that's played out for months through advertising on billboards, buses, radio airwaves and most recently in legislative hearings. Lawmakers must agree to put the project on the November statewide ballot before voters can weigh in.

Las Vegas-based Harrah's, which is working with the tribe to open a casino and would give the tribe a cut of the profit, is betting on Rhode Islanders' already healthy appetite for gambling and the state's reliance on it to persuade voters to let them build a casino.

Rhode Island leads the nation in per-capita spending on lottery-sponsored gambling, at nearly $1,200 per person in fiscal 2003, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

Much of that spending is done at two existing gambling parlors in Lincoln and Newport, which also attract customers from outside Rhode Island. This year those businesses will contribute $220 million in revenue to the state from slot machines.

As part of its lobbying efforts, Harrah's, which operates 26 casinos in 12 states, has flown in to Rhode Island gambling proponents from around the country, including Tom Hanafan, mayor of Council Bluffs, Iowa.

"I heard all the negative information, that local businesses would close and restaurants couldn't compete," Hanafan said. But eight years after gambling on two riverboats and at a dog track were approved, the dire predictions haven't come true, he said. "Gaming has improved our community."

Tourism has picked up, the community of 58,000 has more restaurants now than it did before and 3,500 jobs have been added, Hanafan said.

Harrah's has promised more than 3,200 direct jobs and $150 million in state and local taxes in its first year of operation in West Warwick. The company wants to compete primarily for Massachusetts and Rhode Island customers now traveling to Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Connecticut.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island residents spent $829 million and $301 million, respectively, last year at those casinos, according to the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis.

But Lincoln Park and Newport Grand worry a Rhode Island casino would not only siphon business from two of the most profitable casinos in the world, but steal their customers too.

Gov. Don Carcieri told a House panel last month he's "gravely concerned we are about to get on a path that will change the whole nature of what our state is about."

"The dirty little secret about casinos is that basically, a casino wants to create a wasteland around it," the Republican governor said.

Despite the opposition, House Speaker William Murphy, D-West Warwick, expects the Harrah's project to get on the statewide ballot.

"We've seen the success casinos have had in Connecticut," Murphy said. "I think it is something the people of Rhode Island deserve to vote on."

Whether voters would support the binding question is another matter.

A poll released in March by Rhode Island College found more than three-quarters of those surveyed supported a statewide vote on a casino. But only four in 10 said they would back the idea.

The Narragansetts have spent five years trying to develop a West Warwick casino, but Harrah's will own it.

Unlike other federally recognized tribes, the Narragansetts can't build a casino on their reservation land, or anywhere else, without voter approval. The 2,800-member tribe has struggled with high unemployment and many have turned to Connecticut's two Indian-run casinos for jobs, Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas says.

It's not unusual for gambling interests to target economically depressed areas such as West Warwick, says Earl Grinols, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has long studied the gambling industry.

In a small state such as Rhode Island, the cost-benefit analysis needed could well include the project's effect on the entire state, he says.

"You have to add up all the winners and losers," Grinols said. "The guys who win tend to be the owner of the casino."

The debate over a casino has gone on for so long in West Warwick that many locals are unaware a statewide vote may be near, Town Council President Jeanne-Marie DiMasi says.

But for the community of 30,000 residents, devastated by last year's nightclub fire that claimed 100 lives and budget woes that will delay spending for police cars and road and building repairs, the prospects of a casino are enticing. In the first year, a casino promises to generate about $14 million for the town.

"We tell people this is the year it will get on the ballot," DiMasi said.