Winning lesson for tourism officials: don’t place big bets on gambling
Enthusiasm ran high among local government and business leaders this summer as they joined executives from a commercial gaming company to celebrate the ground-breaking for Toledo’s first casino, says The Toledo Blade.
“Toledo Mayor Mike Bell deployed metaphor to thank officials from Penn National Gaming, Inc., of Wyomissing, Pa., for handing a ‘life preserver’ to those aboard the city’s sinking ship of an economy. The move was termed a ‘game changer.’”
“Yet a close analysis of the economics of casino gambling, in addition to interviews with experts in the gaming field, suggest a more modest long-term economic benefit for the Toledo area. Most of the benefits are added government revenues from taxing gambling proceeds,” the report found.
For the city, county, and all county public schools, that annual benefit is estimated to reach about US$25 million, though with several caveats.
Standing in the way of a bigger payday is Toledo’s “time and place in the expansion of commercial gaming,” the study found.
When casinos open in virgin gambling markets that had lacked access to gaming, they typically generate big money for their operators and generous tax receipts for host cities, research shows. Patrons will travel 100 miles or more.
An example is Atlantic City, N.J., which enjoyed a tourism renaissance after voters opened the door to casino gaming in the late 1970s. Only recently did Atlantic City fall on hard financial times as a growing number of out-of-state gambling options chipped away at its regional monopoly.
But Hollywood Casino Toledo may be a little late.
Scheduled to open in the first half of 2012, it will compete with established casinos in Indiana and Michigan, including the three in Detroit often frequented by Toledoans. And it faces forthcoming competition from other Ohio casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati that voters approved last year.
The competition will significantly dilute the Toledo casino’s economic effects, some economists argue, because it must attract money from outside the region to generate a true economic boost for the city.
By David Wilkening
David
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