Island needs casino gambling
Galveston ought to get busy and hire a lobbyist to help bring casino gambling to the island.
Chances are the Galveston City Council will ignore the suggestion and take a more cautious approach, meaning it’s much more likely to do nothing. That’s despite the fact every poll shows a large, growing majority of residents on the island favor casinos and the island’s economy is in very rough shape.
It also is despite the fact the city and the Galveston Economic Development Partnership, Galveston’s economic development arm, have no real plan for the economic revitalization of Galveston Island.
The 2011 session of the Texas Legislature convened last week, and, as usual, several gambling-related bills will come up this year.
Candidly, chances for those bills seem small, on the one hand, because conservative Republicans rule with an iron hand in the Legislature. Those conservatives despise big government and honor private enterprise, but they want at least enough big government to ban casinos and the entrepreneurs who own them.
On the other hand, the Texas Legislature faces a biennial budget deficit of somewhere between $25 and $30 billion (latest estimate is $27 billion). That’s a lot of money, and it will be interesting to see how these fiscal conservatives meet that challenge without raising lots of new revenue.
Once upon a time, Galveston said no to gambling, but the tide has turned. Every survey taken in the last four years indicates at least two-thirds of the city’s voters would approve casinos if given the opportunity.
The Galveston Chamber of Commerce last August did its own survey. Here are some salient points from that survey of chamber members:
- 79 percent said they “believe that casinos in the city of Galveston will help my business.”
- 79 percent said they “believe that the Galveston Chamber of Commerce should advocate casino gambling for the city of Galveston in the next session of the Texas Legislature (2011).”
In addition, chamber members volunteered statements such as the following:
- “We need to bring something to the island to make it more prosperous!”
- “We are missing out on a lot of money by sending people to adjoining states to gamble. It’s time for Galveston to get a piece of the pie and tax the illegal machines already operating in the city.”
(To see the full survey, go to www.galvestonchamber.com.)
The chamber also commissioned a separate study of the economic impact of gambling in other communities. That impact has been enormous and for the most part positive. (That study has not yet been reviewed by the chamber’s board, and it’s not yet posted to the website, but it soon will be.)
Nationally, gambling is a $31 billion industry. It employees roughly 328,000 people and with wages of $13.1 billion — that’s just less than $40,000 per year per job. Last year, the industry paid out $5.6 billion in direct gaming taxes (not including property taxes, sales taxes and so on) in 13 states in the United States.
The best model for a state gambling law seems to be the one in Mississippi where since 1993 casinos have paid Mississippi more than $4.56 billion in taxes. Just more than $1.5 billion went to local governments, and most of the rest funded education in Mississippi and state highways.
This newspaper has been asking one question for several years. Given the sad state of local business, the question is: If not gambling, what will enliven the local economy? And if not now, when?
The fearful truth is Galveston and the state of Texas may wait to embrace casinos until both are forced to do so by very dire economic circumstances. And by then, with established casinos operating in every single surrounding state, it may be too late.