Monday, Dec. 28, 1998 | 10:36 a.m.
CENTRAL CITY, Colo. -- Isolated in a high Rocky Mountain fastness of snow and pine trees, this elegant old mining town of 600 people stands only a mile west of its blue-collar sister village, Black Hawk, population 150.
But in this old gold-rush landscape, modern greed over gambling is plunging the two villages into a municipal feud worthy of the Hatfields and the McCoys.
After Colorado voters in 1990 approved limited-stakes gambling, which caps bets at $5, Central City residents discovered that many gamblers would not drive the extra mile for a slot machine.
People here grumble that their Black Hawk neighbors erected traffic lights and took down highway signs in an underhanded campaign to siphon off gamblers who make the 45-minute drive on Route 119, the winding canyon road from Denver to Central City.
"Gamblers are basically lazy," said Gary Kragenbrink, who recently served as a councilman in Central City. "Black Hawk is really enjoying sticking it to Central now."
As the number of casinos has dropped by half in Central City and as tiny Black Hawk has embarked on about $500 million in casino construction, a 140-year-old municipal rivalry has erupted, pitting plans for a "casino road" against plans for a "casino tunnel," and coming between the two mayors, who happen to be cousins.
"We try to stay out of their business," said Mayor Don Mattivi of Central City, who also said he avoided talking politics with Mayor Kathryn Ecckert of Black Hawk. "We wish they would stay out of ours."
Although Central City once surpassed Black Hawk in gambling revenues, Black Hawk has decisively taken the lead. For the year ending in September, Central City had $92 million in gambling revenues; Black Hawk had $258 million.
Taxes from slot machines pay for almost the entire budget of Central City, but the number of machines has dropped by a third in the last four years, to about 3,000 today. Black Hawk is scheduled to open three casinos in the coming months, and should have 9,000 slot machines by the end of 1999.
With a ruthlessness that the gold miners might have admired, Black Hawk's casinos have gouged into mountainsides for parking, digging at one site below the level of Clear Creek to create a watertight garage.
When Colorado banned children from casinos, Black Hawk responded by making room for a day-care center for the children of gambling parents, a commercial exception in a town with no gas station, bank or grocery store.
In Central City, residents now look enviously down Gregory Gulch, where building is under way on Las Vegas-style casinos with names like Riviera, Mardi Gras and Isle of Capri. Gambling has become so popular that Route 119 has recorded the fastest growth of any road in the state in the 1990s, quintupling its traffic since 1991, the first year of gambling.
In a daring plan to clip Black Hawk's wings, Central City started buying and annexing land to extend a city "street" eight miles across some of the roughest mountain terrain in the United States.
The $64 million, four-lane road would cross county lines to the southeast at 8,500 feet, descend 1,000 feet on a steep grade and drop gamblers at Interstate 70. It would be a safer and shorter alternative to the existing interstate link, a dirt road marked on most maps as "Oh My God Rd.," presumably for its divine views and unholy hairpin turns.
In a counterattack, Black Hawk unveiled blueprints for its own secret weapon: a $50 million tunnel punched through solid granite. Financed by casinos, the four-lane tunnel would speed gamblers 1.3 miles north through a mountain, depositing them on a road leading to Black Hawk's busy gambling halls.
Undeterred, Central City retaliated last month, unveiling maps of land it planned to annex to isolate its road from any effort by Black Hawk to build a cutoff. In response, Black Hawk revealed that it had secretly paid an 85-year-old widow $50,000 to buy mining rights along the route of Central City's proposed casino road.
"We've got a big bag of tacks, and I have just taken out a handful and spread them out on their road," chortled Medill Barnes, executive director of the Black Hawk Casino Owners Association. With a wink, he declined to reveal if he had bought other mining rights along the route, saying only, "This is war, nuclear war."
The Gilpin Gazette-Crusader, a Central City newspaper that broke the mining-claims story, used words like "venal," "fraudulent" and "sham" to editorialize against "the last-minute land deal."
The rivalry between the villages dates to 1864, when they incorporated within a day of each other. Central City, a mercantile and mining center that billed itself as "the Richest Square Mile on Earth," encouraged workers from Black Hawk's sulphurous smelters to take baths and change their clothes before going to Central City to attend church, the Opera House or the Gilpin County courthouse.
When flush toilets came to the finer homes and hotels here, Central City residents knew full well that the waste flowed downhill to Black Hawk when they pulled the chain. Because of deforestation around Central City's gold mines, floods routinely swept down Gregory Gulch, covering Black Hawk's streets in mud and rocks.
But now, Central City, which once had ambitions to become the capital of the Colorado Territory, finds that it is not so central.
To some, the proposed eight-mile road is Central City's equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in football. To pay off municipal bonds, Central City taxes slot machines at a rate 50 percent higher than the rate in Black Hawk. But the daily yield here, $72 a machine, is almost half the yield in Black Hawk.
Assessed real-estate values have dropped to $48 million, one-third less than the $64 million needed to pay for the road. Mattivi is unfazed, saying, "An extra five-buck drop per machine pays for the road."
Accusing Black Hawk of "taking advantage of a little old lady with three mining claims," he vowed: "They have only succeeded in delaying the road for one year. We will condemn the right of way."
Caught in the middle is Luella Thomas, a fifth-generation Central City resident who sold Black Hawk the mining claims that her late husband stopped working half a century ago. "I had no idea when they purchased them what they were going to do with them," Mrs. Thomas fretted. "I love both towns. But I am afraid that in Central City now my name is mud."
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