Slot machine foes kick off signature tour

BANGOR – With less than six weeks left before the Oct. 4 deadline for petition signatures, opponents of slot machines gathered Friday in front of the Hollywood Slots on Main Street to launch the “Protect Your Pocketbook” tour, part of a statewide signature drive aimed at banning the machines in Maine.

About a dozen anti-gambling people from the area showed up, including a gambling foe wearing a homemade slot machine costume.

Representatives of Penn National Gaming Inc., which holds the state’s only slots license, declined to comment about the rally or the signature drive.

During the event, opponents of gambling said some of their top concerns were that once gambling begins in Bangor, it will spread to other parts of the state, that gambling will put Maine families at risk and that social costs associated with problem gambling will outweigh any economic benefit.

“What happens in Bangor isn’t going to stay in Bangor,” George Rodrigues, president of No Slots for ME! said in a poke at Las Vegas’ well-known slogan. A push to introduce slots already is under way in Washington County, he noted. There also has been talk about trying to bring slots to Sanford, he said.

Leading the anti-slots charge besides No Slots for ME! are the Christian Civic League of Maine and the Maine Grass Roots Coalition. On Friday, the Colorado-based Focus on the Family ministry announced it too was supporting the anti-gambling movement in Maine.

As of Friday, slots opponents had gathered almost half of the 50,519 valid signatures of registered Maine voters needed to get a referendum question aimed at banning slot machines on the November 2006 statewide ballot, according to Michael Heath, the Christian Civic League’s director.

“Nothing corrupts a society so quickly and thoroughly as gambling,” Heath said during a press conference that was part of the kickoff.

“The lure of fast money is as ruinous to good government as it is to individuals. An honest society will not look to gambling as a solution to its economic woes, any more than an honest man will turn to crime as a solution to his poverty,” Heath said.

Gil Reed of Carmel, one of about a dozen slots opponents who came to Bangor for the kickoff rally, opposed slots for moral reasons.

“We just believe that gambling is contrary to the word of God and contrary to the will of God,” Reed said.

B. Calvin Bubar, a Brewer businessman whose family’s association with the league is three generations deep, was most concerned about potential adverse effects on area families.

“These folks who’ll be coming here, many of them just can’t afford to lose this money,” Bubar said.

He said that companies like Penn National Gaming Inc., which is opening its Hollywood Slots facility in November, made their profits from their patrons’ gambling losses and that the company would compete with existing local businesses.

To make that point, Paul Madore of No Slots for ME! turned up wearing a “slot machine” made from cardboard boxes and paper. When large paper “paychecks” were put into a slot in the front of the box, a sign reading, “Sorry. Try again,” popped out of a slot at the top.

“We don’t want it, and we’re going to get rid of it,” Madore said of gambling in Maine.

Madore is a key organizer of the Coalition for Marriage campaign, which seeks to repeal LD 1196, Maine’s new law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. A referendum question to that end will appear on the Nov. 8 statewide ballot.