Indeed, one of the truest of truisms maintains that what goes around comes around.
Wait a while, and everything old will become new again.
In October of 2004 I wrote in this space that the key argument in efforts to lure a horse track and slots parlor here comes down to the question of just whose ching is it anyway. I was hoping to outline the fight over the ten million dollars a year the legislation requires the operator to pay the host community, and the effort by Mountaineer Gaming to get the local community to kick half of it back for site improvements.
Fast forward 16 months to just this week, when Summit Township Supervisor Marlin Coon decided to “set the record straight” by writing a commentary that was included in the Township newsletter, opinions that later appeared in the Erie Times-News.
While targeting the newspaper specifically, Coon also chastises the media in general for allowing taxpayers to believe that a private developer would be benefiting from taxpayer dollars.
Therein lies the rub.
Coon doesn’t believe the dollars are public, so he sees no problem in giving a developer his own money back.
“These are dollars over and above all existing taxes,” Coon insists.
That’s true, but only because it’s a new tax, on future slots parlors existing for the first time in Pennsylvania.
Someone will have to widen lanes and install traffic lights for the new venture. Someone will have to provide extra policing and security. Someone will have to be trained in how to handle a fire in a horse barn, and have the equipment necessary if lives have to be saved, both human and equine.
Slots parlors create expenses for a community as well as revenues. Slots operators are expert at keeping food and drink and gambling dollars in house, and racinos near interstates are rarely economic engines for the communities that host them.
People stop by, spend their money, jump back on the highway and go home.
Lawmakers know that, and purposely set aside revenues so that smaller communities would not have to bear of brunt of the public cost of slots.
So, sorry, Mr. Coon, but those are tax dollars, and if half of them go to the developer for site improvements, then there are that many fewer dollars left for the inevitable cost of supporting gaming.
What goes around comes around, and the argument over the ching that fueled the debate over five years ago rages still.