COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — You can tell the Ameristar riverboat casino is a riverboat by the neon that outlines its wheel and smokestacks. But the lights that most interest Iowa are the ones twinkling on the Omaha skyline across the Missouri River. Iowa has put not one but three full-blown casinos right next to Nebraska’s biggest population center.
Nebraskans now ask whether they should stop opposing casinos and start supporting their own. After all, they already suffer the social and economic ills of having casinos nearby. Iowa, meanwhile, keeps over 20 percent of the three casinos’ gross, which totaled $261 million in the eight months that ended Feb. 29. Casinos may be awful things, but why not keep some of that loot at home?
Such thinking has ignited a kind of gambling arms race across the nation. States keep building bigger and more aggressive gambling ventures to meet the challenges from other states.
Pennsylvania and Maryland might soon allow slot machines to lure their gamblers back from Delaware and Atlantic City, N.J. West Virginia may upgrade its racetracks to full casinos to keep the suckers coming from Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Connecticut plopped the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere near the borders of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Another casino soon followed. Residents of Massachusetts and Rhode Island spent an astounding $1.1 billion at the Connecticut casinos last year. Such numbers have spurred on casino advocates in both states.
A Nebraska state senator got the ball rolling two years ago by proposing to put several casinos within a two-mile zone along the Iowa state line. Building these casinos near the river, Sen. Chris Beutler argued, would bring in gambling revenues "while not significantly increasing the exposure of Nebraskans to gambling."
Robert Goodman, a gambling expert at Hampshire College, in Massachusetts, begs to disagree. As casinos become more convenient, he says, they create more gamblers. And the problems associated with them — robbery, embezzlement, fraud, bankruptcy — get only bigger.
Testifying in Nebraska some years back, Goodman recalls, he was told by a state legislator, "We have to fight fire with fire." Goodman’s response was that "if you fight fire with fire, all you’re going to get is a bigger fire."
Casino companies like to brag about the taxes they pay, but they never mention the taxes lost as they drain customers from local restaurants, theaters and other leisure destinations. Omaha must be especially protective of its Old Market district, a lively mix of hip restaurants, shops and lofts still being developed.
Does anyone seriously think that once big-time gambling interests obtain a beachhead on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, they will stop there? At the very least, casinos would open the door for Nebraska’s Indian tribes to build gambling facilities all over the state.
Furthermore, there’s talk of escalation by Iowa’s tribes: If Nebraska builds casinos around Omaha, the Poncas might try to build a casino on Carter Lake, which is virtually spitting distance from Omaha’s shiny new convention center and arena on the Missouri. Omaha has worked hard to spiff up its waterfront.
Jim Clifton, CEO of the Omaha-based Gallup Organization, spoke to the aesthetic concerns. In a letter to Nebraska lawmakers, he warned that "casinos instantly change the dignity, the sophistication and the positive image of business in our state."
And the casino scene in Council Bluffs is pretty darn shabby. The riverboats were originally sold to the public as a charming, Mark Twain sort of thing. (People could almost hear the tinkling of the old piano.) The reality is otherwise.
The "boats" are virtually windowless, so that scenery won’t distract customers from the flashing slot machines. The riverboats are almost seamlessly attached to the big food-retail-hotel complex on shore. Most visitors don’t even notice that they are boarding a floating object. (Iowa law requires that the casino make a "cruise" now and then, to prove it is a boat.)
Let us briefly note two moral arguments against casinos: They fleece the most vulnerable members of the community. And they undermine the American value of hard work as the key to economic reward.
So wherever placed, casinos are bad influences. The only thing less appetizing than a casino right over the state line, it seems, would be one inside it.
Froma Harrop is a Providence Journal columnist. Contact her by writing to
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