Md.’s gambling problem: Slots stalled 1 year after vote

Pitching the referendum, Maryland’s political brass — from Gov. Martin O’Malley to Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett — said gambling companies would flock to the state, paying tens of millions of dollars for licenses and uncorking torrents of money once the slots were up and running. In addition to fattening up the state’s treasury, gambling was supposed to cure Maryland’s storied but ailing horse-racing industry.

Officials estimated that the slots would be worth $600 million in yearly revenue in just a few short years.

But a year later, only two licenses have been granted. Not a slot machine arm has been pulled. An effort to put slots in Anne Arundel County is stalled by a zoning battle. A proposed casino in Baltimore is still waiting for the $20 million licensing fees and the proper paperwork. There have been no bids for a license in Allegany County in Western Maryland.

Magna Entertainment Corp., which owns Pimlico and Laurel Park racetracks, botched its applications for slot machines and has since filed for bankruptcy.

“The voters were duped,” said Barbara Knickelbein, a citizen activist who led opposition to last year’s referendum. “The governor has egg on his face. He thought this was going to be God’s answer.”

O’Malley spokesman Shaun Adamec said the slots movement has seen “relatively few hiccups.”

“This is a process that has never been undertaken before and to some extent had to be invented as it went,” Adamec said. “The fact is, this was never supposed to happen overnight.”

But Maryland Senate President Thomas Mike Miller, D-Prince George’s County, said the state had to start over.

“There’s no question about it,” Miller said.

Miller blamed the state’s gambling problems on its opponents, who he said put “crippling amendments” into the legislation — giving placement authority to local zoning officials, forbidding casino interests to offer “entertainment,” requiring union contracts and living wages for casino employees, and giving the state nearly two-thirds of slot revenues — that “sabotaged” the effort.

“In order to put it in place to appease the various interests, we had to make a bill that was almost a nonstarter,” he said.

Anne Arundel resident Rob Annicelli, who is leading local opposition to put slots at the huge Arundel Mills mall just south of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, said political leaders let themselves be dazzled by rapacious gambling interests.

“To think that the big, friendly gaming industry is coming in to care about you as a resident? No way,” he said.

At about the same time voters were pulling the levers for slots, the nation’s economy was collapsing. America’s gambling industry has been mugged like every other sector, with lottery and other gambling revenues falling last year for the first time since 1970. Maryland’s gambling revenues — including lottery and keno — fell by nearly 7 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009, the nonprofit Rockefeller Institute reported.

“It’s a tough environment,” Miller said.

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