Gambling expansion wait urged Board advises seeing how racino pans out

AUGUSTA – Maine Gambling Control Board members agreed Tuesday to recommend that state lawmakers and the public wait to see what impact Hollywood Slots at Bangor, the state’s only racino, will have on Maine people before taking steps that could lead to an expansion of gambling.

The seven months worth of gambling experience under the state’s belt simply is not enough of a track record on which to base conclusions, board members agreed during their regular monthly meeting.

And the experience to date has come from a temporary facility housing only 475 slot machines. Hollywood Slots’ parent company, Penn National Gaming Inc., plans to replace it in mid-2008 with a large permanent complex, with up to 1,500 slots.

“There’s no rush,” Chairman George McHale, an Orrington broadcaster who also heads the Maine Harness Racing Commission, said after the meeting. “We need to take a deep breath and pause before the state rushes headlong into expansion.

“What we’re saying is that it’s not our job to determine if expansion [should be allowed],” he said. But if the state does put such a decision off until more information is available, he said, “we’ll be better equipped to determine what kind of a state we want to be and where we want to head.”

“Personally, I’d like to see several years of moratorium,” he said. “We’re going to know a lot more a year from now. Now we know what we know.”

Board member Michael Peters, a Dixfield businessman, will draft a resolve to that end for consideration by the rest of the members.

Though board members acknowledge the resolve was nothing more than a recommendation that people could take or leave, it at least would get their position across.

“We can’t tell people not to [submit legislation or petition for a referendum],” Larry Hall, a retired state trooper and businessman from Dedham, said. “We can just say from our perspective that it might be wise for the state to wait.”

Fellow member Peter Danton, a Saco businessman and former state senator who serves on the state’s liquor and lottery commission, agreed. He said nothing prevented a lawmaker from submitting a bill seeking an expansion of gambling.

Cushing Samp, a Saco attorney who joined the board in April, thought the proposed hiatus was a “common-sense proposal. … It is our sentiment that people not enact legislation to provide for more racinos or casinos” until more facts are in.

The resolve, which will be disseminated to lawmakers and the public, likely after the November general election, would say “that the board would look unfavorably on new development of racinos or casinos until we know the results and can evaluate it for ourselves,” Peters said.

“The reality is, from my own personal study … it takes two to five years for problems and both positive and negative things to happen,” Peters said. “The social and personal implications are all going to crop up later.”

Those impacts, Peters said, are something the state leaders and regulators need to get a handle on before deciding if Maine should stick with one gambling site or allow others to be developed.

Peters insisted he was “not pandering to CasinosNo! because I could care less what they think.”

In a recent letter to the editor, the anti-gambling group’s executive director, Dennis Bailey, cited a study by David Mustard and Earl Grinols concluding that casinos breed crime and other social problems and that it takes about 14 months for people to get addicted to slot machines.

Noting that the Bangor City Council last fall asked state legislators for a three-year moratorium on major changes to the state’s slots law, Peters said, “I’m not going that far.”