Salon at the Rue de Moulins
Maryland’s struggle with gambling is at once funny and painful to watch – sort of like a bad Three Stooges movie. After years of arguing and posturing, Maryland voters finally approved slot machines in the state. The mechanism, a constitutional amendment which specified not only the location but also the number of machines and the proportion of the proceeds that the state would receive has turned out to be a headache.
Slots were approved over strong opposition including religious opposition in Prince George’s County and elsewhere and opposition by progressives in Montgomery and other counties who thought that slots would be a regressive tax on the poor. Partly as a result of their opposition, the two counties were not among the five locations designated in the constitutional amendment to receive slots.
Next up came the ludicrous bidding process. It was originally thought that the sites in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County would be the race courses there – the two largest in Maryland. The owner of the tracks, though, was unable to come up with the substantial deposit required to accompany the bid and was thus immediately disqualified. No bid was received for the site in Garrett County at the Rocky Gap Lodge and the bid for Baltimore City was for a much smaller amount of machines than had originally been envisioned.
More surprising was the only viable bid for the Anne Arundel County site which was not at Laurel Park, as envisioned, but rather at Arundel Mills, a large shopping center in the northern part of the county.
The owners of the race tracks sued, of course, to have their bids count and the residents of Anne Arundel County, who had narrowly voted in favor of slots, found that the situation was much different than they had thought. The county council hemmed and hawed for a year before narrowly approving the zoning for the slots casino but their vote was immediately petitioned to referendum. More lawsuits followed.
Meanwhile, the successful bidders for the Baltimore location changed their composition a couple of times, changed the location and then were unable to show that they had the financing to build and operate the casino.
So…at this point only the small operation here in Worcester County and the larger one up in Cecil County are moving ahead. The Anne Arundel casino is tied up in the zoning referendum (and two different lawsuits) and the folks out in Western Maryland have said that their site can only succeed if the state takes a lower percentage which, of course, would require another constitutional amendment.
Now, a bevy of state legislators are loudly opining that Maryland needs to have ‘table games’ such as blackjack, roulette and craps at its casinos to compete with neighboring states such as Delaware that have approved these. Of course that would require a constitutional amendment.
On top of that, Senator C. Anthony Muse from Prince George’s County has introduced legislation that would authorize gambling on card games at Rosecroft Raceway in the county. The legislation doesn’t specify the types of card games but presumably poker would be involved (no word about whist or pinochle).
Senate Minority Leader Alan Kittleman then introduced legislation that would authorize gambling on card games at SIX locations including Rosecroft. Under his legislation a state commission would pick the other five locations (we know how well that works) and they would not necessarily be the same as the slot casinos.
Isn’t this wonderful entertainment? After arguing about slots for years and then narrowly approving them two years ago, the state is hellbent to legalize every kind of gambling they can think of! Of course, if all of this goes on the ballot this year as constitutional amendments, they will join the other thirty-five constitutional amendments that have been proposed in the legislature so far. Voters, lobbyists, public interest groups, election boards and citizens will have a grand time trying to sort it all out!
My guess is that if Delaware legalized prostitution tomorrow, there would be a bill in our General Assembly the next day and great hand wringing that we were ‘losing revenue’ to our neighboring state.
So sit back, relax and enjoy it. Soon we’ll be able to say: “What happens in Maryland stays in Maryland.”
[Note: the illustration is, of course, the painting Au salon de la rue des Moulins by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painting shows prostitutes relaxing in their salon.]