im not really even opposed to casinos, i just hate the fact that someone in youngstown is decided that a casino is going to be built less than a mile from my apartment.

i have a lot of friends in the victorian village/ short north area and i think there is only one (and even he doesn’t support this bill) that actually wants a casino here.

Governments in Ohio would reap nearly $650 million a year from taxes on the four casinos proposed in a Nov. 3 ballot initiative, according to a state analysis published yesterday.

The 33 percent tax on proposed casinos in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo would yield $643.4 million in annual revenue, the Ohio Department of Taxation and Office of Budget and Management estimated.

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Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady hates to think about what traffic will be like in the Arena District if a casino is built at the western end of Nationwide Boulevard.

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The state is spending $750,000 to clean up an abandoned factory in Columbus for a planned casino even though Gov. Ted Strickland and other state leaders oppose the casino.

The former Jaeger Machine Co. property west of Huntington Park in the Arena District would be home to Columbus’ first casino if voters approve a ballot measure in November for casinos in Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo.

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Columbus tourism officials are worried that they could lose out on hundreds of thousands of dollars and valuable cooperation from casino developers if they don’t support the November ballot issue that would place casinos in Columbus and three other Ohio cities.

Unlike the situation in Cleveland, Columbus political and business leaders — who also help support Experience Columbus, the city’s convention and visitors bureau — are not lined up behind Issue 3, which was favored for passage in a recent poll.

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IF this proposal is going to happen, I wonder if our City shouldn’t look at tying several different initiatives into one package. Specifically :
-Casino
-New Convention Hotel
-Train Station for 3C service

What if the City suggested moving the casino to the site of the proposed convention hotel on High and Nationwide Streets? Then they could capitalize on the stimulus of the casino and the taxes that will be generated to build a facility that will have a hotel and train station attached. They might even be able to build a bigger hotel, since it has been suggested that we are very far behind our competitors in terms of full-service rooms. There could be great synergies developed here.

This assumes that the site is big enough to fit all that (the casino might not like going vertical) and it’s not too late to change the site.

Perhaps they could also look at reviving the Streetcar proposal with some of the revenue to serve a new multi-use facility on this site, although that’s a bit more of a stretch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abSd-TOXbwg

Yeah you’re right, I guess since it’s already broken…

My point is that it’s one thing to say “gambling’s allowed, let the best casino developer/operator win!” and quite another to write a specific business into the constitution of the state.  Plus, doesn’t the state run the lotto?

I don’t buy the “Las Vegas Style” shtick at all. Vegas casinos are more and more convention and entertainment destinations. Obviously, gambling is huge, but it isn’t necessarily the key traffic driver, which is an important distinction. Where that traffic comes from is another important distinction.

While a downtown Columbus casino may have some of the entertainment fluff, make no mistake it’s design is pure gambling with a sophisticated risk management back of the house engineered to empty every local wallet that walks through the door. As most people know, the casino itself would be designed to push and feed every chemical and biological impulse to get local feet back in again and again. Translation – draining local pockets.

Nor do I buy the line on “better marketing”, which is being sold as a key differentiator of this particular effort. I don’t think the public and especially the government is qualified to make an assessment on these particular operator’s marketing savvy.

Additionally, with all the hard work and progress inching forward on developing downtown and supporting neighborhoods the arrival of a casino would destructively piss away the incremental gains we’ve achieved downtown. It would be a dominate, desperate cultural entity in our downtown and surrounding areas. Just what we need to attract and retain the brains we need.

Lastly, a casino as a job growth and economic development engine is about 15 years too late. For once can we go about economic development and job growth in a contemporary, forward thinking, relevant fashion rather than wasting our time with a last minute hail mary bomb that won’t do shit in terms of differentiating or positioning our city/ state for the future.

The fact we have to vote this down AGAIN should tell you something.

I don’t really care if we get a casino or not, I just don’t want it in one of our downtown neighborhoods.  Here’s one NIMBY thing I will fully own!!  Can’t they stick it up near Polaris or somewhere like that?  They’re building hotels left and right up there.  Why?!? 

If those suburbanites stick us with their casino and don’t give us our streetcar, I’m going to be LIVID!!!

I’m really still on the fence at this point. I’m not opposed to the idea of gambling, although I’m not much of a gambler myself. And if Ohio is going to get a casino, I’d rather them be in our Downtowns rather than out in no-mans-land next to an outlet mall.

I’m still concerned that the final product won’t be quite as “top of the line” as we’re being told it will be, and that’s my biggest hangup. If we’re going to allow a private company to build this thing and profit from it, I’d like it to be something state of the art that is really going to benefit our city as much as possible.

The Constitution thing doesn’t really bother me at all, though. Many people seem to take issue with that, as if it’s a sacred document where amendments of any modern sort aren’t allowed. When was the last time anyone even looked at the Ohio Constitution? If Lottery Tickets are in the Constitution, why not Casinos?