At a recent open house hosted by Bloomington, Illinois Mayor Tari Renner, bar owners and gaming machine operators said the city’s moratorium on video gaming licenses is hurting business—and she agreed.
Renner said, “We should be tearing roadblocks down, not erecting roadblocks to jobs and investment in this community. If this were anything other than gambling, I don’t think we’d even be having this conversation.”
She added, “We are not, comparatively speaking, saturated compared to Decatur or compared to Champaign, and there are consequences. Essentially what you’re doing is giving people a monopoly who already have the machines.”
John Canham of Prairie State Gaming said about half the bars in Bloomington want to add a sixth gaming machine, as allowed in the comprehensive expanded gambling bill signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker. Canham said Pritzker is depending on the additional gaming revenue to fund infrastructure projects. “If Bloomington says no sixth machine, and every other municipality followed suit, there’s a $200 million shortfall for the governor’s budget this year. He’s not going to be happy about that,” he said.
Canham said adding one more video gambling machine is not a major expansion of gaming. “That sixth machine will get utilized probably on a Friday or Saturday night when the bars are packed. Most of the time, you go into a bar, there are two or three games being played, so it’s not like it’s a huge increase in gaming that you should be worried about,” he said.
City Council members Joni Painter, Jenn Carrillo and Donna Boelen, all supporters of the moratorium, are reviewing options to present to the council.
