Well, all the votes are not counted yet, but it’s clear that Amendment 50 did pass.
That said, nearly a million people voted No, and for that we thank you all very much. More people voted yes, but with $7 million spent as compared to no money spent on our side, well, it’s good that it got as much opposition as it did.
We’ll leave this contact form up for a little while. If you have anything else we should know about, please drop us a line. We’ve gotten a stack of very nice notes already, thanks much to each of you.
And by the way, if you are one of the pompous poker players who wants to write in just to gloat and make personal insults about the people on the “no” side, well, several of your brothers have beaten you to it, so you can save yourself the time. If you must write in, please use a dictionary. Who knew that gambler/blog trolls were also practically illiterate?
It looks like Amendment 50 is winning. Here’s our official response:
Colorado now joins the states that have high-stakes gambling. While this will create state revenue for one worthy recipient, state community colleges, this benefit does not come without a high price. We encourage the Colorado legislature and all Colorado citizens to carefully monitor the casino corporations to check thenegative impacts expanded gambling will have on our state.
Welcome to all of the visitors finding us today, this is already our biggest day of web traffic ever, and we’ve had some huge ones!
A lot of you are doing some last-minute research before you head to the polls. Thanks for checking out the facts.
Real quick, here’s what you need to know:
Amendment 50 will raise the bet limit from $5 to $100, and make for 24/7 gambling in Colorado. Right now Casinos have to close when bars do, at 2 a.m.
About six percent of the money gambled will go to help community colleges.
Most of the gambling money lost by gamblers goes directly to the Nevada casino corporations that are the biggest force behind the campaign spending more than $7 million to get this passed.
This Amendment would also make it impossible to raise the tax rate on casinos, something that is legal now. Colorado has one of the lowest tax rates in the country on casinos.
While some in education think this new money will help, others are concerned about linking education funding to gambling. Other states such as Connecticut and Pennsylvania have had to cut education programs when gambling revenue went down in the years after this passed.
Mayor John Hickenlooper, Attorney General John Suthers, the Denver Post, the Fort Collins Coloradan and groups as diverse as the Boulder County Democratic Party and Focus on the Family are all against Amendment 50.
There are many more reasons to vote no. If you have another moment, please read more on this blog. What we’ve learned over and over is that the more people know about Amendment 50, the more they don’t like it.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for voting no on Amendment 50!
There’s only been one poll that we’ve heard about. It didn’t look good, but then we keep running into people who say they are opposed. We keep reading blog posts by people opposed. We keep reading newspaper editorials that even when they are not opposed they sure sound that way.
Which makes us wonder what the pollster asked. If he asked a question that sounded like the “Say Yes on 50″ commercials, well, of course it would poll well.
The problem is that voters are faced with the language of the actual amendment 50 or the Blue Book analysis. That leaves a lot of people confused, so they turn here, or maybe they ask a friend, or maybe they just decide that they don’t like being sold a load of manure in the advertising, and they just want to vote no because of that.
Anyway, if you are just researching this for the first time, check out this site, we have tons of information for you, and we’ll try to answer any questions submitted on our contact form as quickly as possible.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for voting no on Amendment 50!
Welcome to those of you who saw us on the Channel 12 debate rebroadcast as part of their ballotpallooza Sunday evening.
Or to those of you just finding us through the Google, and there have been zillions of you. Welcome, all.
The candidate campaigns have worked everybody up into such a pitch that there’s not much room left to talk about the Amendments, and probably half the people have already voted so who knows how it will all play out?
As we noted, the polls don’t look good, but it’s never all that clear with ballot issues. We certainly like our trends with all of our web traffic recently, and a spate of new blog posts and even Facebook posts like this one:
A-50: This amendment has the most deceptive campaign of all the ballot initiatives. The amendment allows the three counties in Colorado that currently are allowed to have casinos to dramatically expand betting limits, hours of operation, and significantly alters the tax distribution and tax rate for casinos. The campaign is focused on the least important aspect of the change: funding for Community Colleges. Colorado Community Colleges are DRAMATICALLY underfunded, but that is not any reason to change our gaming regulations. The amendment was written by the gaming industry to funnel tax dollars into their own pockets for expansion and increase their profits. Don’t be deceived by this deceptive campaign, let’s demand REAL change to find a way to adequately fund our Community Colleges.
Recommendation: NO, NO, NO!
There’s even a whole Facebook Group against Amendment 50 that we just discovered. Awesome. The political theory is that young people will vote yes on this because it means “money for education.” Well, maybe young people know a phony add ploy when they see one.
What’s clear to us is that the more people of any age spend time studying Amendment 50, the less they like it. Will enough people study it closely enough to vote no?
In a couple days we’ll know.
By the way, lots of reporters have been asking us where we’ll be and if we’ll be available for reactions on Tuesday night. We’ll do our best to call everyone back Tuesday night from the glamorous KeepVegasOut Election Night Headquarters (otherwise known as the bar down the street) but we will probably just post our reaction here on this blog if the wifi is working, so check here first!
Well, the one poll we’ve seen shows that it’s not looking good.
And yet…
Our web traffic continues to skyrocket. Given that we have no money, we would have been happy if a couple dozen people even found our site. Instead we are getting thousands of visitors and we know that people are finding our site.
And yet…
Anyone who studies the issue closely comes out against it. The latest is the Sterling Journal Advocate.
This is a bad amendment. This a pathetic and disgraceful way to fund education in Colorado. The payout to schools is an obvious effort to attach something good to a bad law in hopes of getting voter support.
And yet…
We continue to hear about how turned off people are by the advertising on the yes side. (By the way, their funding has continued to grow and is now at $7.6 million.) The quote in that story is very true, money is getting donated to the yes side NOT because casinos believe in community colleges, but because it’s in their business interest to do so.
So, read up on the issues here on this site, and then tell a friend! Thanks!
We got another note recently that reminded us of that one from Bart Berger, who happens to be the Chairman of the Board of the Colorado Historical Society, so he’s seen what has happened and what will happen with Gambling Revenue in Colorado.
We asked him to see if we could post here what he wrote, and he said as long as we were clear that it was not in his official capacity as chairman, but just as a “knowledgeable individual, and a loyal, fourth generation Coloradoan who thinks that this is a cynical, greed-driven measure, foisted on a naïve public, and misrepresented to the voters.”
That might give you a hint about what he’ll say, but here is the letter from Mr. Berger:
It is important to consider the effect on the Colorado Historical Fund that distributes the gaming revenues to historic preservation projects and programs around the state. $200 million toward economies in every county and virtually every community is a good, responsible effect of gaming. Heritage tourism and even State Pride are the beneficiaries here, and every dollar spent in theses efforts has a 8-1 impact in Colorado. What is the economic impact of these additional dollars under Amendment 50?
Amendment 50 puts limits on the growth of preservation money. Any growth that comes from increased gaming is capped for preservation, but not for the casino owners.
Consider that determining the dollars that are generated from increased limits have to be separately accounted for. It is not clear whether they get commingled and distributed in the same way as the previous money. Nevertheless, this is an unnecessary, byzantine and unrecognized part of all this. Who does the counting?
Consider that Amendment 50 changes who gets to set the tax rates. One would do well to know more about THAT.
Before you vote:
Consider that Amendment 50 is about greed, and not about economic development, not about what is COLORADO, and certainly not about you. Community Colleges? Sure, but at the CORE of this apple is a very bad worm.
Didn’t there used to be a pub in the basement of a building at Auraria called the Dragon’s Lair?
We were remembering that because we went into hostile territory last week for a webcast with 9News. One of the community colleges that shares the Auraria campus with Metro and UCD.
The point we have been trying to make here is that Amendment 50 is actually too risky for community colleges. Right now they get money from the state, but that will go down — according to all the legislators who are salivating over the money — when the legislature opens.
So then the colleges get hurt if revenue goes down, and we know that it will.
But to make the case right in the middle of a community college campus? It went surprisingly well, nobody threw fast food at us while we talked, even though the interview was held in a food court, so we’ll call that a victory.
We got a late start with this effort to get the facts out about Amendment 50, and there were a few newspapers in the state that endorsed the Nevada Casino Profit Maximization effort without talking to our side, or really spending any time studying the issue. With so many ballot issues this year, it’s understandable.
There are probably a bunch more that we don’t know about, if you know of one and want to be on the list, let us know.
The blog endorsements that we have seen fall into three groups.
First is those who have studied the issue and come to it from some ideological perspective. They all urge a no vote. Liberalsareagainst it. Conservatives are against it.
The third group is those who favor it — I won’t link to them — but nearly every one is from a poker player who wants to be able to play poker against suckers in Colorado and make more money at it. Really just about everyone who publicly supports Amendment 50 is in it for the money.
The biggest news in this story for us is the deflation of the argument the pro side makes about how we’ll have tourists coming to Colorado to gamble, so we’ll have outsiders paying taxes here. That sounded like bunkum to us, but we didn’t have time to make some calls up to South Dakota to see how it’s played out there for the last few years. Turns out, nobody really travels there to gamble.
Studies by the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau have shown that out-of-state tourists come to the area for the history and to see nearby sites, such as Mount Rushmore, but not the casinos. That’s an indication that much of the growth in gambling revenue has been fueled by locals.
“When you get outside of the 100-mile radius, they’re coming for the history of Deadwood, the whole Black Hills experience,” said George Milos, executive director of the Deadwood chamber.
As such, the chamber stopped marketing its $100 bet limit in Colorado two years ago, Milos said.
So, our question for this morning is this: Is there ANY argument the pro side has made that isn’t a bunch of distortions, half-truths, cynical misdirections or just plain old hokum?
We keep hearing from people who’ve had a look at Amendment 50, and have decided that the in spite of the great sounding advertising, they are voting no.
This kind of comment is typical: “Incidentally, I kind of halfheartedly supported the amendment before I read your arguments… keep it up and good luck.”
The difference is that particular comment was written by a person, Matt Wolf, who read this blog then went with his turned-around opinion and wrote about it on his own blog, and did a nice job, too:
When big gambling interests like Ameristar and Isle of Capri fund an amendment like this in our state, attempting to increase the bet limit by a factor of 20, while at the same time making it harder for the state to raise taxes on them, it feels like a hustle, and these people are pretty damn good at that.
Vote this thing down and make them come back next year with something better.
With such a long ballot, people are counting on friends, blogs, and their own research to help them decide on some of these issues.
Maybe like Matt, you don’t like how the casinos are preventing tax increases on casinos.
Maybe you don’t like the idea of encouraging more excessive gambling in a tough economy.
Maybe you don’t want the state being addicted to gambling, using gambling money to pay for the very essential needs of community colleges.
Maybe you don’t like the idea of drunken gamblers on the highways every hour of every day.
Maybe you don’t like the idea of opening the door to Indian gaming for one of the nine historic tribes in Colorado.
Maybe you don’t like how this will hurt the tribes in Southwestern Colorado.
Maybe you don’t like the ruse of giving “local control” to allow the mountain towns to vote on the changes when everyone knows that all three towns will adopt the changes before the ink is dry on the Amendment.
Maybe you don’t like casino profit-maximization efforts getting shoehorned into the Colorado constitution.
Maybe you don’t like how this is a back-door tax increase.
Maybe you like the idea of a balance between no betting and high-stakes betting, so you are waiting for a plan that has the bet maximum going up by a factor of something less that 20X, which is what this one will do.
Maybe you just don’t like deceptive advertising and want to vote no because you know the casinos are trying to play you for a sucker.
Whatever the reason, don’t keep it to yourself. Let your friends know about this blog, and how you are voting!
Our web traffic continues to climb. We had a huge day Tuesday, which we thought was because of a couple of broadcast appearances, one on a 9News webcast and another on KHOW. (We’ll try to get those posted soon.)
The thing is, our numbers were even bigger Wednesday when there were no big media mentions of the KeepVegasOut site.
We can tell from our tracking that thousands of people are just sitting down and googling around and finding us. Somehow they aren’t convinced by the $7 million that the big casinos are spending in advertising. Many people actually seem inclined to vote no just because of the ads, which are clearly hiding something.
We’ve gotten a number of great letters, too, including one below that we just had to share with everyone (after we got permission from the writer):
Dear Scott and Jon,
Thanks so much for this very informative website. I started out as a supporter of 50, thinking that more money to colleges had to be a good thing. I also pushed my two voting age kids to do the same- I now have some quick phone calls to make to change their minds.
I am a pharmacist practicing in southwest Littleton, but 16 years ago I came out of the Army looking for a job in a bad economy. I turned to gaming in Central City, thinking this would provide a chance to move up in an industry that didn’t necessarily require a good deal of education to move ahead. Reality turned out to be much different than my hopes.
I did work up to slot shift supervisor at the Glory Hole Casino in Central City, but what a price to pay for a lousy $10.00/hr. I worked nearly 14 hours a day when travel time was factored in. Weather was often tenuous and downright horrible at times, taking the bus was out of the question since that would add more time to my day, and the many times that I viewed the buses laying at the bottom of Clear Creek because of driver error stopped that notion in its tracks. My days, nights, weekends and holidays consisted of keeping high rollers dropping their coins by serving them food at the slot machines and comping all of their drinks. Often I would talk to individuals who had just spent their entire paychecks and in tears wondered how they were going to tell their spouses that the house payment couldn’t be made this month. I once was working at my station when a man clutched his chest, collapsed on the floor, and died of a heart attack. My change crew gathered around to support the security personnel working on him, and all the while patrons harangued us for ignoring them and not bringing change fast enough. All added together, gambling in these towns brings out the worst in people and the new possibility of 24/7 casinos means added misery to those who man these halls- for all of the aforementioned reasons and more. I guess your various articles brought back those bad memories, I hope this amendment goes down in flames.
One of the worst bits of propaganda from the big casino corporations is that gambling revenue always goes up and doesn’t go down, even in hard economic times.
“Colorado casinos reported declining revenues in September, with total proceeds of mountain gambling establishments dropping by 18.7 percent to $59.3 million, according to the state’s gaming division.”
That’s why the big casino corporations want Amendment 50 in Colorado: They want to do something to make more money, and they have shamelessly co-opted the community colleges to try to get their profit maximization efforts into the Colorado constitution.
Of course, what they will never say is that Amendment 50 will likely bring about a huge drop in gambling revenue to the state, hurting community colleges the worst. Why? The higher limits will make it more enticing for one of the nine tribes with some claim to Colorado to bring an Indian casino to the Front Range. (They are already operating near Durango and Cortez.)
If an Indian mega-casino comes to Denver — which could happen with NO vote in Colorado, only action in Washington — all the gambling revenue that might go to community colleges would dry up because Indian casinos don’t pay taxes. They do, however, pay giant Nevada gambling corporations to run the casinos, which is part of the reason why Nevada gambling corporations are spending so much to get this passed in Colorado.
They have covered their bets!
Don’t play their game. Vote no on Amendment 50 in Colorado.
We’ve gotten lots of comments from people who said that they are voting no just because of the deceptive advertising that is saturating the airwaves. The casinos really seem to think that nobody will actually read the text of Colorado Amendment 50 in this busy ballot year. It is a packed ballot, but Colorado voters are smart enough to sniff out a con job from big spending casino corporations.
But it’s the stories we are hearing from individuals that are making us glad we started this blog.
Some are stories about the generally pernicious nature of gambling, and how it hurts real people:
“I have a relative who used to tell us how each time they went gambling they always won. It was amazing. Right up to the time they had to file for bankruptcy.”
Some others understand that Amendment 50 is a bad idea to put into the Colorado constitution. “We let the camels nose in the tent when casino gambling first came to Colorado. Now we are on the edge of getting the whole thing. The only real beneficiaries will be the casino owners.”
Share your stories with us, but most importantly, tell a friend, write a letter to the editor, call in to talk radio. Let people know what you think. It’s hard to be heard amid the roar of $7 million (and growing) that the casinos are spending, but the truth always rings out loud and clear.
People often look to others as a guide in voting on amendments, especially when there are so many. The problem, of course, is that no one person exactly maps onto another person or organization.
This is especially true with Amendment 50. There’s no real money to be made opposing it, so our side has only this blog. Those who oppose it aren’t all that vocal about it, they just don’t like it. It’s an easy one to check off the list and go and figure out all the others.
The people who support Amendment 50 in Colorado have something to gain from Coloradans voting yes. We urge a no vote not because we have anything to gain, but just because we wanted to give a voice to all those who think it’s a bad idea to put whatever Casinos want into the Colorado constitution.
Other groups feel more or less the same, and have said so. The diversity of those groups is breathtaking. When is the last time that the Boulder County Democratic Party and Focus on the Family have been on the same side of an issue?
So if all those who care about the issues and care about Colorado’s constitution are voting no, who is voting yes? And why are they?
The town of Blackhawk’s response: we receive so much state gaming revenues that we have run out of appropriate places to spend the state money. Or as State Representative Al White more eloquently stated: “I think they have gold-plated every outhouse on the hillside and there’s no place else to look to expend historic dollars in a reasonable fashion.”
Under Amendment 50 these same local governments will receive hundreds of millions of ADDITIONAL state gaming revenues. That is on top of the current state funds they are using and misusing. The Colorado Legislative Council issued an official State Fiscal Impact Report on Amendment 50 and found that Amendment 50 would distribute an ADDITIONAL $64 million dollars over just the next 5 years to local governments with gaming towns.
Remember, these towns are infinitesimally small. Cripple Creek and Black Hawk both have fewer than 100 registered voters.
If the gaming towns cannot find appropriate uses for current state gaming revenue, why in the world would we send hundreds of millions of state taxpayer dollars to these towns in the future? Remember that Amendment 50 would be permanently inscribed into the Colorado constitution. Even if the Colorado Bureau of Investigation confirms that local governments have misappropriated state gaming funds there will be no way to stop this flow of hundreds of millions of additional state dollars going to these same local governments.
There are plenty of critical needs for additional state funding in Colorado- K-12 education, higher education, state roads, public transportation, etc. Do we really want to send hundreds of millions of state revenue dollars to local governments that admit they have more state money than they can legally spend?
Voting No on Amendment 50 is the only way to prevent this train wreck from occurring.
Peter Blake is one of the great journalists in Colorado, and while he’s not on staff at the Rocky any more, he continues to be one of the more incisive writers covering politics. He took his whack at Colorado Amendment 50 in today’s paper:
How much does it cost to pass an initiative whose opponents have spent zilch, zip, zero – nothing beyond a few hours of their time? How about, for starters, $7 million?
That’s what the group called Colorado Casinos for Colorado Casinos has spent on Amendment 50 so far this . . . No, wait, I’ve got the name wrong. It’s called Coloradans for Community Colleges! Can’t imagine how I got so confused. The TV spots don’t include shots of smoky casino interiors filled with platoons of grim blue-haired ladies working two one-armed bandits at a time. Instead they feature leafy campuses, earnest students huddled at computers and browsing library shelves, plus a few Victorian exteriors from the mountain towns of Central City, Black Hawk and Cripple Creek.
Thanks, Peter, and great work as always! The only correction we would make is that the group should not be called “Colorado Casinos for Colorado Casinos” but instead: ”Nevada Gambling Corporations for Nevada Gambling Corporations” because the biggest donors trying to get Amendment 50 passed in Colorado are actually the gambling company overlords from Vegas.
By the way, just for the record while we know we aren’t going to be raising any $7 million, or even $1 million, we aren’t opposed to raising money! With the state of the economy, a zillion other ballot initiatives, and the fact that nobody really stands to profit from killing Amendment 50 in Colorado, we know that our chances of raising money are slim, especially because we aren’t really doing any dialing for dollars.
If, however, someone reading this would like to chip in a few bucks so that we can produce some videos to put on youtube and a couple of other low budget ideas we have, well, we encourage you to act now!
The CBI is investigating, as is the JeffCo DAs office. Now a member of the legislature wants the state to audit the books.
“I think they have gold-plated every outhouse on the hillside and there’s no place else to look to expend historic dollars in a reasonable fashion,” White told 7NEWS. “They’re dedicating all of these funds for the operation of these two departments and I don’t think there’s a logical connection between those departments and historic preservation.”
As a result, White sent a letter to the Legislative Audit Committee asking for a thorough examination of Black Hawk’s spending.
Just so we are clear, Amendment 50 would dramatically increase the amount of money going into these funds that have been so scandalously mismanaged over the last 18 years.
Maybe they’ll have to put diamonds instead of gold on the outhouses?
Most of the newspapers in the state have made an endorsement one way or the other on Amendment 50. We’ve been around the meetings where these kinds of things are discussed, and most people would be shocked at the random nature of the process. The internal politics of the newspapers play a huge factor in which way a paper will endorse.
Then once the decision is made, the editorial page editor will assign one member of the board to write up the position of the newspaper.
We bring up this bit of inside-baseball newspapering because another newspaper just came out against Colorado Amendment 50. What’s notable is the strength of conviction in the writing by the Steamboat Pilot in urging a no vote.
Not surprisingly, some of the biggest supporters of Amendment 50 (outside of community colleges) are the casinos themselves. They stand to make a lot of money if bet limits are raised, and they’re using community college funding as a guise to gain voter support.
We shouldn’t be so easily fooled. If Colorado citizens want additional funding for their community colleges, then we should demand that our lawmakers make it a priority. But raising bet limits and adding casino games isn’t a responsible way of supporting higher education. Rather, we fear it will hurt those who can least afford to take a hit in their pocketbooks.
Vote “no” on Amendment 50.
The rest of the editorial is just as strong. Compare that to the recommendation to vote yes from the Rocky Mountain News with the title “Gaming measure flawed, but not fatally,” this is some of what they wrote:
“While the amendment is flawed and had us going back and forth in weighing its merits…”
and
“Even with an inflation escalator, however, the maximum bet today would be less than $10. Amendment 50 instead seeks a twentyfold rise in the limit. A lower maximum, say $25, would have been an easier sell.”
and
“Higher betting limits will also boost the incentive for Indian tribes to bring off-reservation casinos to Colorado. So long as the $5 limit is in play, there’s little reason for tribes to swap reservation holdings for private land near population centers as they have in other states and then build massive gambling resorts on their newly acquired property. With a limit of $100, however, all bets are off.”
and
“We’re also concerned about oversight of the windfall to gambling towns. Denver’s 7 reported this year that officials in Black Hawk spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars refurbishing their homes and taking lavish vacations. A new gusher of revenue will provide even more temptation for these abuses.”
and
“Look, we’re never comfortable setting funding formulas for specific public programs in the state constitution.”
All that is from an editorial urging a yes vote?
Clearly writing that editorial was tortuous for whomever had to write it. Our hunch is that like most voters in Colorado, the person who wrote that does not really want to use his or her vote to help casinos make more money.
Anyway, we’re glad the Steamboat Pilot wrote clearly and endorsed in the right direction, and didn’t have the split personality of most of the “pro” editorials.
By the way, if you are a no vote, be sure to tell some friends. We don’t have $7 million to try to hoodwink voters in Colorado, so we are counting on all of you to help us spread the word. Thanks!
In the month that we’ve been at this, our Sunday web traffic usually takes a dive. Today it’s higher than most weekdays. Maybe that’s because we were on the excellent “Your Show” earlier, or maybe it’s just because the weather is junky and people are realizing that they need to figure out this ridiculously complicated ballot.
We’ll have more reasons to vote no here in the days to come, especially as we see more of how the Big Casinos spend some of their $6.6 million (so far) to try to convince Coloradans to “say yes on 50.” If you have any questions or have other reasons to vote no, please feel free to contact us.
Unlike the other side, we do not have millions. All we have is the truth, and a blog hosted for free. (Thanks, WordPress!)
Thanks for reading, and thanks for spreading the word about this site, and thanks for voting no on Amendment 50!
9News just did a terrific story about gambling in the mountain towns, and while the story didn’t specifically mention Amendment 50, the facts of the story illustrate two big reasons why Amendment 50 is so dangerous.
First…
Gambling, it turns out, faces the same kinds of economic pressures as other sectors of the economy.
Empty Casino (source: 9News)
Amendment 50, when you actually read it, makes it clear that the money that might go to community colleges comes only from the new revenue. All the money currently collected at the casinos will not go to education. If there’s no growth, there’s no money for community colleges.
Let’s say this amendment to the Colorado Constitution does result in some new revenue for the casinos. Four out of five dollars collected goes to the casinos. From that last dollar, 78 percent will go to community colleges. (The legislature, of course, will take out from community colleges whatever gambling puts in, so it isn’t clear that there will be that much new money.)
Amendment 50 is too big of a gamble for our nurses, firefighters, and all those who need community colleges!
Here’s the second reason this story illustrates why Amendment 50 is so… yechy:
“They’ll hit a jackpot,” said Sault. “’Oh, I can pay my bills now.’ I heard that on the landing just a couple weeks ago. She said, “Oh thank God, I can pay my car payment and my phone bill now.’”
Look, we’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who say something like, “Amendment 50 is great because it takes money from the dumb and I’m not dumb.”
The question we think Colorado voters should be asking themselves is this: Do they really want to use their vote to make more money for casinos on the backs of people who should be saving money to pay their bills? It’s true that people may always make bad choices with money, but do we want to give them more bad choices? Bigger bad choices? More dangerous bad choices? That is exactly what Amendment 50 does.
Colorado has a nice balance of having gambling, but not excessive gambling. Let’s not mess that up.
Big Casinos have started running print advertising to go along with their radio and TV advertising. All of it talks about nurses and firefighters. A print ad today has a single mother.
What do all of these have to do with more profits for Big Casinos? NOTHING!
Here’s what Amendment 50 does: It allows the Nevada Corporations to explode the bet maximums by 2000 percent, and allows 24/7 gambling. All of this is designed to make those out-of-state corporations make more money.
From the new revenue, the casinos take 80 percent. From what’s leftover, some of that will go to Community Colleges. What goes in to Community Colleges from gambling will come out from the Colorado general fund. Don’t trust us on that, just ask any legislator, or read the quote from a member of the House Finance committee in the Denver Business Journal.
Then anytime there’s a downturn in Big Casino revenue, it’s the community colleges that get hurt the worst and hurt the first. Remember, the Nevada casino corporations will ALWAYS get paid first.
When community colleges get hurt because of Amendment 50, that will actually be a sad day.
Vote No on Amendment 50. Don’t gamble on the future of our education.
Many people tell us they are voting no on Amendment 50 because they don’t like the state being involved in making money off something that can be so destructive to individuals and families. The statistics on bankruptcy, suicide and more create overwhelming evidence for many voters that gambling is inherently troubling, and the state sanctioning of that gambling gives casinos the imprimatur of acceptability that drive many people who would not otherwise have a problem with gambling to develop one.
That’s a sound, solid and persuasive argument and we agree completely.
Some other voters, however, are unimpressed with that argument, saying that adults should be able to do whatever they want. This is essentially a libertarian argument which also believes in legalizing prostitution, etc. Those voices make a lot of noise on the internet, but it is not a view shared by any sizable group of voters.
Amendment 50 will Trap Colorado
OK, that was a very long introduction to the point of this post: We are concerned about individuals getting addicted to gambling, but we are also very concerned about the state of Colorado getting addicted to gambling money.
Up to now the state has used gambling revenues for the “nice to haves” such as open space and historic renovations.
Amendment 50 is a dangerous turn away from that. Under Amendment 50 the funding for Community Colleges, a “must have” in our view, will come almost exclusively from gambling.
But it is also dangerous for the same reasons for Colorado to become addicted to Gambling revenues. Consider the case in Connecticut:
While the casino revenues make up a small portion of the annual budget, which hovers around $18 billion, the state has become dependent on the money, Stillman said.
“Let’s face it, the state’s addicted to gambling,” she said, “whether it’s the casinos, the lottery, Powerball. We do depend on that revenue to help fund our programs.
“I think some of us, through the years, have always said at some point we’re going to hit a stone wall here, and we have to be careful how much we depend on revenues from gambling,” she said. “And I think this is reflective of that.”
When we warn about impending trouble for the state of Colorado if Amendment 50 is passed, we are not warning about some theoretical problem we just dreamed up. We are warning about what is happening right now in other states that have gone down this path.
There are dozens of arguments against Amendment 50, and only one argument for it: Casinos should make more money. Colorado has been able to keep a balance between having gambling and not becoming dangerously addicted to gambling. Let’s keep that balance.
Jerry Kopel served 22 years in the Colorado legislature, and his memory of gambling in Colorado is spot on:
Casino proponents — not legislators — wrote the constitution’s original casino language. It passed in 1990, 574,620 to 428,096.
The casino-written language deliberately placed power in the hands of a gaming commission to assuage opponents and make credible the claims that this was going to be a “mom and pop” operation: A few slot machines in the front or back of stores selling rocks, T-shirts or groceries.
That’s how we remember it, too. Have you been to a gambling town lately? The mom and pop stores have been pushed out. There are only giant Nevada corporation casinos now, and they want to make more money, which is why they want to sucker Colorado voters into voting yes on Amendment 50. Kopel writes about that, too:
Amendment 50 also was written by the casino proponents, not by the Legislature. Under Amendment 50, increases in gaming bets, hours or types of gaming are taken from the gaming commission and indirectly given to the casinos.
Kopel also details the ways in which oversight of the casinos would be “crippled” and he’s right about that, too. Go read his whole story here.
Great new story out tonight on the 7News site with a look at some of the wording of the deceptive ad that the huge Nevada corporations are spending millions to air over and over and over in hopes that nobody will notice how deceptive the claims are.
The story points out what a ruse the whole thing about “letting the local people decide” is. As few as 100 votes in Black Hawk would mean that the new rules would be enacted, 7News points out. Of course it’s also true that Black Hawk and Central City compete with each other, so there’s no doubt that both towns will immediately enact all of the possible changes as soon as it’s possible to do so. Big casinos wrote those changes into the Amendment to the Colorado Constitution because that’s what will make them the most money.
The story also hits on the word that is most grating to us: “Minor.” The ad that the casinos are running says that the changes to the laws are “minor.”
And to claim the modifications to gaming rules are minor is misleading.
Misleading is an under-statement, in our view.
Consider just this: A 2000-percent increase in the gambling limit is minor? The stock market went down today by less than five percent and the headlines understandably are saying that this was a major drop. By the Big Casino’s reasoning, however, it was infinitesimal.
One quibble we have with the 7News story and with the high-priced campaign the casinos are waging to talk about Amendment 50. They talk a LOT about “78 percent” of the new money going to education. That’s just not true. It’s 78 percent of the 20 percent that is taxed, or about 16 percent. Fully 80 percent of the money goes straight to the casinos in one of the lowest tax rates in the country on gambling.
Which brings us back to the heart of the matter: Why would anyone in Colorado want to spend their vote to help make big casinos a lot more money?
By the way, this story from 7News comes before another one with the usual suspects taped last week before the pro-gambling side started ducking debates. When that hits, we will of course link to it here. We also have a few more media appearances coming, and we’ll let you know about those when we can.
