By Staff Fri, Feb 03, 2012
One of the most powerful forces in the state of Florida is the Walt Disney Corp. The company’s Disneyworld in Orlando attracts millions of visitors to the state and its deep pockets contributes millions to statewide political campaigns. And when you add a new power broker, the Seminole tribe, which operates highly successful casinos in the Tampa and Miami areas, it’s an almost insurmountable barrier.
That seems to have been the case with the commercial casino bill sponsored by Democrat state Senator Ellyn Bogdanoff and Republican Rep. Eric Fresen. It was Fresen’s House committee that spelled the end of the road for the bill. Bogdanoff had been able to pass the bill through a Senate committee, but the real opposition was thought to be in the more conservative House.
After weeks of cajoling and trying to line up votes in the House Business and Consumer Affairs, Fresen withdrew the bill last week without a vote, leaving open the possibility that it could be added as an amendment to another bill. The move, however, effectively kills the bill for this session of the legislature.
The bill calls for the establishment of three destination resorts in Miami Dade and Broward counties—with voter approval—and require an investment of at least $2 billion each. The bill would have also tightened up loopholes in Florida laws that have allowed more than 1,000 internet cafes to start up and a possible slot parlor in the panhandle town of Gretna surrounding legal betting on barrel racing.
“If that doesn’t scream lets get this together and put a control on it, I don’t know what else does,” he said.
Fresen also pointed to approximately 100,000 jobs that he said would be created by the destination resorts in a state with a higher-than-national-average unemployment rate.
“It will create tens of thousands of jobs, absolutely,” Fresen said. “I do believe that.”
Also testifying was Miguel Fuentes of the Florida Carpenters Association who said that his members are suffering up to 40 percent unemployment and need this bill.
“On Main Street people are wondering what Tallahassee is going to do today,’’ he said. “I just want an opportunity to have something to compete for; to tell my guys, 10,000 carpenters who want to go to work who don’t want to go on food stamps.”
In addition to Disney and the Seminoles, opponents included the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association and various religious groups,
The vote was a disappointment for the large casino companies. Las Vegas Sands Chairman Sheldon Adelson had courted Florida Governor Rick Scott to support a bill (although Scott never indicated his position on the bill during the weeks of debate). Wynn Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn proposed a huge resort adjacent to the Miami Beach Convention Center to help revive that facility.
But the company most invested in Florida was Malaysia’s Genting bhd. Genting paid $236 million to buy 14 acres of waterfront land in Miami, including the offices of the Miami Herald newspaper, as well as contributing more than $600,000 to Florida political campaigns. The company also hired more than a dozen lobbyists to shepherd the bill through the state legislature.
Before the hearing last week, Florida voters said, by an overwhelming margin, they want the last word on gambling in the Sunshine State. In a survey commissioned by the Miami Herald, 81 percent of likely voters said they believe that any proposed changes to state gaming laws should be decided in a statewide referendum. Only 8 percent were against it.
When it comes to so-called “destination resorts” with Vegas-style gaming, proposed in a controversial new bill, voters were about evenly split, the Herald reported. Forty-four percent of those interviewed in January opposed new gambling, and 42 percent supported it.
“There is a clear division in the state with a majority in Southeast Florida in favor, while every other region is nearly evenly divided,’’ said Brad Coker, director of the nonpartisan Jacksonville-based Mason Dixon Polling and Research.
Fifty-eight percent of voters think an expansion of casino gaming will help increase tourism and bring more revenue to the state. Only 12 percent agree with the Walt Disney Company and its corporate allies that gaming will tarnish the reputation of Florida as a family-friendly destination, hurting tourism and reducing revenue.
Even so, an anti-casino group recently released a study linking casinos to an explosion in the crime rate, and said Florida will end up paying big-time for increased gaming. The No Casinos advocacy group, whose membership includes former state Senator Dan Gelber and billionaire auto magnate Norman Braman, said the state would pay an additional $3 billion in incarceration costs over 10 years if resort casinos open in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, where up to three $2 billion resorts could be constructed.
“Our community needs to focus on the harsh realities,” Gelber said.
Meanwhile, voters are taking the statewide discussion as their cue to consider new gaming on a smaller scale, and racetrack veterans like John Brunetti Sr. of Hialeah Park are looking at casinos as a way to shore up the struggling parimutuels.
In the rural counties of Gadsden and Washington last month, residents approved referendums to bring Las Vegas-style slot machines to their local horse and dog tracks; the Gadsden measure passed by a resounding 67 percent. And a bill proposed by Senator Maria Sachs of Boca Raton would open the door for at least three other counties—Palm Beach, Brevard and Lee—to hold referendums on Class III slots.
Sachs’ bill would allow greyhound tracks to stop racing dogs, a top priority of the Palm Beach County Kennel Club, Flagler Dog Track in Miami and Mardi Gras casino in Hallandale Beach.
“Disney upgrades its rides every year,” Sachs told the Herald. “The same thing should be allowed with gaming.”
Carl Schwing, city manager in Bonita Springs, Lee County, told the Daytona Beach News-Journal the decisions on gaming should be made “based on what the board here wants to do, not what Tallahassee wants to do.”
Sachs’ bill would prohibit slot machines at the tracks until 2015, when the state’s compact with the Seminole Tribe, giving them exclusive rights to blackjack and other table games, expires. Until then, the state is expected to receive $233 million a year in revenue from the tribe’s casinos.
According to MSNBC, competition from new casinos could cut the tribe’s revenues by as much as $400 million a year. The tribe is “working with big business interests behind the scenes in Tallahassee to kill the casino proposal,” the news outlet reported. If new gaming had been legalized, the tribe would consider its compact nullified, cease making payments to the state, and begin offering craps, roulette and certain other Las Vegas-style games.
