BANGOR – With the state’s first slots facility going on line this week, all eyes will be on Bangor – including the eyes scanning the monitors connected to the 120 surveillance cameras spread throughout the ceilings of the building.

Those cameras, in little bubble enclosures, will focus on the slot machines, the play areas, the people who work at the facility, the patrons, everyone who walks through the racino’s doors for the first time this week.

Penn National Gaming Inc.’s Hollywood Slots at Bangor will open its doors Friday with a Tinsel Town-style premiere, complete with celebrity look-alikes, set for 10 a.m. at the Main Street facility.

The state’s efforts to make sure the operation is fair and secure began long before the first slot machine rolled off the delivery truck at the end of September.

The goal is to ensure that the Bangor slots facility, the first of its kind in Maine, stays free of fraud, Robert Welch, executive director of the Maine Gambling Control Board, said recently.

“We’ll be ready. We’ll be standing tall, ready to go,” said Welch, a former deputy police chief in Bangor who next month will mark his one-year anniversary as the state’s slots czar.

Getting there, however, has had its challenges.

The facility’s 475 slot machines will be operated under a set of stringent rules put into place several months ago by the Maine Gambling Control Board, appointed by Gov. John Baldacci after Maine voters authorized slots for the state’s commercial harness racing tracks two years ago.

The rules, which cover everything from the screening of individuals and companies and handling of surveillance records to the placement of ATMs and problem-gambling information, are aimed at ensuring that both the public and Penn are protected – and that the state, the host city and beneficiaries outlined in state law get every penny of the proceeds that they are due, expected to be about $12 million a year.

In addition, all of the companies involved in the slots operation, and many of the employees, have undergone fingerprinting and background checks. Penn also ran credit checks on managers and other staff who will be handling money.

As a relative newcomer to slots-style gambling, Maine has benefited from many of the measures that the nation’s gaming industry has put in place to thwart cheaters, both from the public and from their own staffs, Welch said.

“Technology is improving rapidly,” the gaming official said. A case in point is the central site monitoring system, a state-of-the-art, computerized tracking system being run by Scientific Games International, which runs the Maine lottery and has its Maine office in Gardiner. Repeated efforts to reach Scientific Games officials for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

The system used in Maine was piloted in New Mexico. That system, a mirror image of the one used for Bangor, not only tracks and records slots transactions, it also allows state regulators to disable any slots from the off-site control office that show signs of tampering or if the operator fails to forward the state’s share of the proceeds, according to Greg Saunders, deputy executive director of New Mexico’s gambling control board.

In Maine, the monitoring system will track and record every transaction made on all 475 of the Bangor facility’s slots, including every time a slot machine is opened for servicing or maintenance.

Last Friday, with less than a week to go before Hollywood Slots’ scheduled opening, representatives from Penn National, Gaming Laboratories International Inc., which is the state’s independent testing lab, and Scientific Games International were busy getting the slot machines to “talk” to the state’s central site monitoring system.

By Monday, the machines were on line with the state system, said Jon Johnson, general manager for Penn’s Bangor operations.

He said staffers would test the system and the slot machines today.

Penn National has 16 uniformed security guards and six surveillance workers at the Bangor racino. Their roles are “to make sure that the customers and the assets of the company are protected,” Johnson said, adding that even though the Bangor slots operation is a small one by some standards, it still will bear watching.

“There are people who target new facilities like ours,” he said.

Security officers, he said, likely will spend most of their time on customer service tasks, such as giving directions and pointing out the restrooms, while surveillance workers will monitor the closed-circuit television monitors linked to the ceiling cameras in their work area on the building’s partial third level.

The count room, where cash will be counted, can be reached only through a “man trap,” or a secure, two-door system, much like a sally port, which allows only one door to be open at a time.

Employees involved in emptying the cash boxes inside the slots and counting money must wear white pocketless jumpsuits and work on a Plexiglas-topped table to prevent their stashing cash on their persons or elsewhere in the windowless room equipped with surveillance cameras.

In addition, two civilian inspectors from the Maine State Police gambling control unit will be posted at the Bangor facility.

Patrons will put dollar bills or paper tickets into the slot machines. When they finish playing a machine, or want to head home, they press a “cash out” button, and out pops a paper ticket. The ticket can be turned in for cash or inserted into another machine for more play. The slots and payout kiosk can read only tickets printed on special thermal paper.

Don’t even try to copy them on your home computer or office copy machine, officials warned.

Both Don Winslow, Bangor’s police chief, and Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross said Welch had briefed their departments about the coming slot machines.

Asked if he thought Bangor was ready for slots, Winslow said, “Absolutely. I’m not concerned that we’re going to have a big increase in crime.

“I think service-related calls will probably go up, though,” he said, citing traffic, parking issues and removing unwanted people as among the problems local police likely will be called upon to resolve.

“You know, the things that we see with any large groups of people,” he said. “I know that Penn National is going to be running a clean ship. I think there’s a solid plan in place.

“They will take care of most of the problems inside,” Winslow continued. “They’re going be really proactive. Any problems related to the slot machines and gaming itself will be handled by state police.”

Ross said his deputies could be busier with routine calls.

“Well, you know, we always wonder how [facilities that bring a lot of people to the area] will affect our personnel and our jail population,” Ross said. “I’m not saying that there will be, but with more people coming into town, there’s a potential for more crime. I think that’s been a concern.”