Residents of Rockaway Beach, a tiny “quiet, slow-paced” Missouri resort town 11 miles from Branson are pinning their hopes for economic revival on the promises of an unnamed billionaire that Mayor Don Smith has been talking to. The billionaire, he says, is interested in bringing a riverboat casino to the town.
The Branson Tri-Lakes News last week quoted Mayor Smith as saying, “This guy, I’ve met with him, I’ve talked on the phone with him several times, we met with him two weeks ago and he straight told me, ‘I’ll give you $15 million right now. $15 million is nothing to me. I just want the casino here.’”
The proposal would require an amendment to the Missouri state constitution, which currently only allows gaming on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. It also limits the number of casino licenses to 13, and currently all 13 are spoken for. In addition, the state’s voters in 2004 rejected allowing a riverboat casino in Rockaway Beach.
Smith says the southwest part of the state is losing tourism money because it doesn’t have a casino. Smith’s town of about 850 residents was once a flourishing tourist village until the construction of the Table Rock Dam in the 1950s changed the water in the lake from warm to cold
