4 January 2006
Dianne BennettCasinos are simply bad business
Statement by Dianne Bennett at the 3 January 2006 press conference announcing the anti-casino lawsuit filed that morning in Federal court. Bennett is a Buffalo attorney and a member of the steering committee of Citizens for a Better Buffalo, the group coordinating various anti-casino legal efforts.
Many, if not most, in the business community get it: they understand casinos are simply bad business for everyone, except the casino owners. The business people and other residents of Buffalo have been left out of the discussion; it’s time to let us back in.
We understand simple math. You can’t look just at what’s coming in; you also have to look at what’s going out. What might come in? There are promises of money spent on a building, of jobs that may or may not materialize (casinos generally do not produce the number of jobs they promise), of a fraction of the profits to the city. Compare those to net job losses, net business losses, net tax losses, taxpayer money spent on traffic, safety, infrastructure to support someone else’s cash cow. Before you even get to the social problems, and their very real economic costs, the bottom line from casinos flows with red ink.And what legitimate business will want to locate its employees where it knows they are a free Metro ride away from spending their money and impairing their productivity?
The Entertainment District built by entrepreneurs like Mark Goldman, Mark Croce, Steve Calvaneso… the downtown real estate developers and new city-dwellers, inhabitants of downtown apartments and lofts… the products of their efforts will be sucked away into the vortex of the casino. Everything Buffalo has been building will be devastated.
Go one block off the boardwalk in Atlantic City, go to Detroit. No major U.S. city has garnered net jobs or net profits from casinos. Add to that a casino that apparently doesn’t have to play by rules developed over more than a century, rules designed to protect workers’ wages and health and safety. And current businesses pay taxes that support the city services they use; but not this casino. The result: a recipe for economic disaster.
We’ve heard Americans decry outsourcing. Here we’re outsourcing to another sovereign nation right inside our own city. We’re giving away our economic base and getting nothing but burdens in return.
We say to the Governor and the politicians who continue to blindly support this Trojan Horse, enough with fuzzy math. Stop the casino and let our business entrepreneurs continue to develop and re-create our City.
Copyright 2006 by Buffalo Report, Inc.