Friday, June 10, 2005 | 6:21 a.m.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at [email protected].
WEEKEND EDITION
June 11-12, 2005
"We are going to see a better Las Vegas, a nicer Las Vegas to live in."
-- State Sen. Mark James, commenting after the passage of his 1997 law that was touted as the end of neighborhood casinos. I KNOW you are busy circling items in the Neiman Marcus catalog or calling cruise lines to spend your much-anticipated rebate checks, but pause for a moment for deja vu on a more interesting and politically charged legislative issue.
In fact, this is the third session where a measure hyped as limiting neighborhood casinos became a focus of attention. It happens, for some reason, every eight years -- from 1989's AB 845 that created gaming enterprise districts to James' SB 208 that supposedly further restricted gaming's creep outside the resort corridor.
And if the past is prologue, the future is anagrammatic, as this year's AB 485 may have jumbled the numbers from its 16-year-old progenitor, but the concept and the politics were the same.
Suddenly -- bless their hearts -- gaming companies want to protect the neighborhoods from, well, them. Oh, it's protectionism all right, the most ruthless kind of anti-competitive behavior imaginable, disguised as a measure to help keep neighborhoods free from the evil influences of, well, them.
The only difference this session was that the relentless avarice of the gamers and some developers was matched by the brute thuggery of the Culinary Union and its labor allies, who used threats, rumor-mongering and political gamesmanship to entomb the bill so that -- bless their hearts, too -- the neighborhoods could remain pristine. This is a story worth retelling in its raw, distilled form:
Early in the session, virtual monopolist Station Casinos, apparently believing that enough is never enough, concocted a scheme using distance requirements to try to ensure no one else could enter the locals market.
Speaker Richard Perkins, running for governor and always friendly with the Station folks, agreed to shepherd the Station bill through the lower house.
By the time Perkins realized just how Machiavellian the legislation was, though, Boyd Gaming and others had scuttled the idea.
But what if another scheme could be worked out whereby Station, Boyd and master-plan developers could all benefit -- that is, close out everyone but them? So new language was crafted limiting neighborhood casinos to master-planned communities and tailor-made for Station and Boyd and major developers such as Focus and American Nevada, which is owned by the same folks who own this newspaper.
The spin wrote itself: This would result in fewer neighborhood casinos, people would know locations with certainty and more public hearings would be mandated. Fewer casinos, more certainty, additional public comment periods. I, like many others, was lachrymose.
The Culinary Union, which is as obsessed with anti-union Station as it ever was with Gondolier Numero Uno Sheldon Adelson, was not crying, though. The union seized on the excision of an appeal process inserted into law by James eight years ago, which allowed aggrieved neighbors to seek denial from a review panel of something called the Gaming Policy Committee. That body consists of five members -- two gaming regulators, an Indian chief and two residents.
Door hangers and automated phone calls attacking the casino industry (oh, if only Station were union-friendly, this all could have been avoided) were unleashed in key Assembly districts. Then the unions, which had always been friendly with Perkins, trained their guns on the speaker, who had agreed to push the second incarnation of the neighborhood casino bill. Labor insiders openly talked about the end of Perkins' career and spread asinine rumors that the speaker had been promised a high-level job with Station Casinos.
These tactics did more to anger than intimidate those who had committed to the measure. But the key factor became Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, who as the incoming speaker was inheriting a caucus that she didn't want riven by this issue. Buckley might have gone for a compromise -- a moratorium and a study. But when she was informed by bill advocates that they were going to run over her, she explained that not only could she take votes away from them, but that she also could stop a vote entirely.
Faced with the prospect of a caucus that Buckley might now control, and despite the presence of Station, Boyd and Focus reps in the building, Perkins elected not to push the issue. It left him as a gubernatorial candidate who had satisfied neither labor nor gaming -- not the best place to be, although it may be reparable considering the unions' commitment to principle is often as long-term as the casinos'.
That political maelstrom and its consequences aside, the underlying debate, as is too often the case in Carson City, was never joined. In a schizophrenic community where people don't want casinos in their backyards but many want them not too far from their backyards, what do you do?
Do you undermine the notion of representative government, which too often has shilled for the casinos, by inserting an unqualified panel as a final arbiter, or do you force local bodies to be more accountable through stricter zoning ordinances and not simply guarantee that all master-planned communities will have casinos?
Amid all the measuring tapes and grandfathering in of favored insiders that has gone on, those who opposed gaming's spread across the valley have lost. Red Rock Station is not your grandfather's Bingo Palace. But have we sacrificed community maturation on an altar of convenience?
That discussion is moot. As for the debate over what to do with your rebate check, be realistic. Put away the Neiman catalog and the cruise line numbers and just cash it at a locals casino. Chances are there's one near you. Or there will be soon.
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