Indiana senator touts impact of gaming

CHICAGO -- An Indiana state senator on Wednesday told the National Gambling Impact Study Commission how casinos steered the city of Gary, a once-dying, crime-ridden community in her state, on the road to economic recovery.

"We have started back," Sen. Earline Rogers said. "We are not starting back on the shoulders of the casino industry. The casinos will not carry us. We do not want that. But the casinos have given us that hand up we needed."

Her words were typical of most of the elected leaders in four Midwestern riverboat states who came here to tell success stories of their own.

Mayors from eight riverboat towns held a news conference outside the two-day hearing to extol the economic virtues of gambling.

Since the first riverboat casino began operations in Iowa in 1991, more than 40 have followed suit in that state and Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.

Today, riverboat gambling is one of the fastest growing industries in the country, taking in billions in revenues each year and revitalizing small communities along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

But this economic success has brought a social downside that also surfaced in testimony before the federal commission.

"Gambling produces winners and losers -- and victims," William Witt, an Iowa state representative, told the panel.

Witt, a leading critic of gambling in Iowa, said Iowa State University researchers recently concluded that the number of problem gamblers there have skyrocketed from 40,000 before riverboat casinos to more than 140,000 today.

Personal bankruptcies are up 34 percent despite Iowa's low unemployment rate, Witt said.

"Gambling persuades by shifting blame," he said. "It profits by shifting costs, and it constantly denies responsibility for either.

"But many Iowans are starting to catch onto gambling's cannibalistic nature, and they're expressing growing concern and resentment."

Tom Grey, executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, told the commission how his grassroots group has taken advantage of the backlash to stall the spread of casinos in the Midwest.

"We have fought gambling at the ballot box, the state house and in the courts," Grey said.

Such divergent opinions about the impact of gambling have presented the commission with one of its most difficult tasks as it studies gambling across the country.

One neutral observer, Illinois Gaming Board Administrator Michael Belletire, testified that he believed the "experiment" with casinos in the Midwest "has been generally positive."

Belletire said casinos have created new jobs and pumped money into river towns for much-needed infrastructure.

"In general, there has been no increase in crime in riverboat communities," he said. "But it cannot be said that the propensity to gamble in excess has not led to tragic consequences for some ..."

Belletire added that riverboat gambling in the heartland "has not been as detrimental or as malignant to our social fabric as its critics contend, or as important or as benign as the industry makes it out to be."

He said the states, not the federal government, should be allowed to deal with gambling's positive and negative sides.

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