Columnist Jeff German: Casinos flexing muscle

Friday, June 3, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

The session-ending donnybrook in Carson City over neighborhood casinos is coming down to whether residents are going to have a real voice in what ends up in their backyards.

Powerful casino and developer interests are trying to muscle lawmakers into eliminating an appeal process that has helped residents limit the spread of neighborhood casinos in the past.

Leading the charge is Gaming Inc. and its A-Team, anchored by political kingmaker Billy Vassiliadis, along with neighborhood gaming giants Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming Group. They are allied with the Focus Property Group, one of the valley's biggest developers of master-planned communities.

Anti-neighborhood casino groups have enlisted the help of the influential Culinary Union, which is trying to organize workers at the two gaming companies, to beat back the effort.

The fight is over Assembly Bill 485, which started out as a simple bill to limit neighborhood casinos in Northern Nevada -- that is until Gaming Inc. and company got their hands on it.

When the Senate passed it over the weekend with several gaming-sponsored amendments, it had turned into a measure that helps Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming retain their dominance in the neighborhood casino market in Southern Nevada. It also gives them the upper hand in future battles with residents.

The bill allows future neighborhood casinos to be built only in master-planned communities, which means the current projects not in master-planned communities that both companies have in the works are assured of not having any nearby competition.

But what has raised the anger of residents and rallied the Culinary Union to their cause is the portion of the bill that abolishes the five-member review panel of the state Gaming Policy Committee, which has authority to overturn locally approved casino projects.

The measure replaces the review panel with an arbitrator who only has power to reject casino projects on technical grounds.

So far, however, the Assembly isn't going along with the Senate's amendments, and one key assemblyman, Judiciary Committee Chairman Bernie Anderson, has predicted that the bill won't make it out of the Legislature without the review panel.

Gaming Inc. and its friends in the media have tried to minimize the importance of the panel, which was created in the 1997 law that first restricted neighborhood casinos.

But that argument is easy to see through.

The whole idea of the panel, says former Sen. Mark James, R-Las Vegas, the sponsor of the 1997 law, was to give residents an inexpensive and simple method of appealing the decisions of their local governments.

"It provides an independent body that can hear these appeals that doesn't require someone to go immediately to court," James says.

It saves residents the expense of having to hire high-priced lawyers to fight for their rights.

Records show the review panel has heard only two appeals since 2000, but both times it has sided with residents and rejected a neighborhood casino project. It killed a Boyd Gaming project in Spring Valley and a Station Casinos project in North Las Vegas.

The panel is batting a thousand for residents.

"What kinds of safeguards are we going to have without this?" asks Anna Bradford, a Spring Valley resident who helped lead the fight against the Boyd casino in 2000.

And here's something Gaming Inc. and its spinmeisters neglect to tell us when they describe this panel as obscure and insignificant.

The state's top two casino regulators, state Gaming Control Board Chairman Dennis Neilander and Nevada Gaming Commission Chairman Peter Bernhard, are members of the panel. Two of the other members are average citizens, and the fifth member comes from an Indian tribe.

What James and the 1997 Legislature did here was give residents a level playing field, one less susceptible to political influence, when they take on a powerful casino company.

Take that away, and it's advantage Gaming Inc.