King: Casino a house of cards Veto promised for gambling plan

AUGUSTA – When State House lobbyist Jon Doyle closes his eyes and envisions a new casino in Kittery, he sees a gleaming resort casino that would be the Foxwoods of Maine.

When Gov. Angus S. King contemplates the same concept, he imagines a Sodom-by-the-sea and vows to veto any legislation that would permit the plan to go forward.

Now carrying an estimated construction cost of $500 million, the gambling resort proposed by Maine’s Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indian tribes is being quietly promoted at the Maine State House by Doyle, fellow lobbyist Severin M. Beliveau and tribal attorney Tom Tureen. Beliveau and Tureen, who brokered the landmark 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, joined tribal representatives in remaining tight-lipped on details of the plan. But Doyle said Wednesday the tribes are planning a major gambling resort in Kittery that would actually rival Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Conn.

“Structurally, it would look like the old Samoset Hotel in Rockland, Maine,” Doyle said. “It would produce as much as a $100 million annually to the state’s General Fund. We’re talking about a very substantial kind of facility here.”

Then there’s King’s reaction to a Maine casino.

“I think it takes money out of pockets of local people,” the governor said Wednesday. “It’s not true economic development. It brings with it inevitable corruption. I don’t care what anybody says, when you have that much cash, it’s not healthy. And I’m opposed.”

Still, in the midst of a recession, the tribes’ promise of $100 million in annual state revenues from the casino is hard for cash-strapped legislators to resist. Matt Connor, who edits Indian Gaming Business magazine out of his office in Little Falls, N.J., said gambling businesses are frequently the first refuge of states searching for new money to offset revenue declines. Maine is currently in the process of determining how it will close a $160 million revenue gap in its current $5.3 billion, two-year state budget.

“In economic recessionary periods, that’s usually a time when gaming rises again because it seems like a painless way to get some state revenue,” Connor said.

Sen. Ken Lemont, a Kittery Republican, said he was eager to begin the debate on whether the Maine Legislature should permit the tribes to move forward with a bill allowing them to designate some Kittery property as the site of the new casino. Although Lemont said he had agreed not to identify the property by name, he did say the land in question was near Interstate 95 and contained 150 to 200 acres.

“This is our window of opportunity,” Lemont said. “We either do it now or we don’t do it because the other states are moving in that direction and there is a market for it. Once other states go forward with their plans, we’ll never be able to do it.”

Located 50 miles from Boston and directly across the Piscataqua River Bridge from Portsmouth, N.H., the proposed gambling resort would only increase the north-bound exodus of shoppers who frequent Kittery’s sea of outlets. By contrast, Foxwoods is 112 miles from Boston.

Rep. Chris O’Neil, a Saco Democrat, said lawmakers were told that the Indians could expect to receive $50 million annually from the casino, which would employ 4,000 people. O’Neil said he was told that 80 percent of the casino’s customers likely would come from out of state. With new gambling venues sprouting up in New York and Connecticut, one might wonder whether another large casino in Maine would threaten to saturate the market and reconfigure the gaming landscape in New England.

“We wouldn’t be worried. We’re very comfortable with our customer base,” said Bruce T. MacDonald of the Foxwoods Casino. “Our experts believe there’s a lot of depth to this market and it is not yet fully tapped.”

Despite that unrealized potential, Maine’s Indian tribes face long odds as they attempt to set the casino plan in motion. Critical to their goal is the crafting of a special casino bill that will have to be so popular that two-thirds of the lawmakers in the Maine House and Senate can be mustered to override the threatened gubernatorial veto. And time is not on their side. The Legislature is required by law to adjourn by April 17, unless the lawmakers vote to extend the session. Because the tribes cannot construct a casino in Maine without the approval of the Legislature, they hope to have a bill admitted after deadline as emergency legislation. Legislative leaders offered competing outcomes on the likelihood of admitting the legislation so late in the current session.

“But we’ll listen to it with open minds and determine whether an emergency truly exists that warrants our consideration,” said Senate President Pro Tem Michael Michaud, an East Millinocket Democrat.

Before that happens, however, Maine’s two largest Indian tribes will have to develop a lot more information than was forthcoming Wednesday. Donald Soctomah, the Passamaquoddys’ tribal representative to the Legislature from Princeton, declined to offer anything new on the proposal beyond the tribes’ desire to attract legislative support for it. The representative said the Indians’ silence was part of their overall strategy.

“We want to have all our facts together before people apply their own wrong facts and misinformation,” Soctomah said.