Michael Mathis climbed the stairs and opened a door onto the roof of 101 State St. in downtown Springfield, overlooking a construction site he says will be one of the largest private developments in Western Massachusetts’ history — MGM Springfield, a planned 14-acre resort casino.
Mathis, CEO of MGM Springfield, says the first building to go up will be a garage for all the cars headed here.
"Right off the I-91 highway, which delivers about 100,000 cars past our site every day,” he said.
Many of those cars, and the potential customers in them, would be coming up 91 from Connecticut. Until now, the closest casinos were the state’s two tribal ones—Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods—less than an hour from Hartford.
All over the country, casinos are springing up within competitive striking distance of one another.
"It’s an arms race,” said Richard McGowan, a business professor at Boston College who’s written a number of books about casinos. “[In] 1964, you had one state with casino gambling and one state with a lottery," he said. "Fifty years later you have 43 states with lotteries and 38 states have some form of casino gambling in it.”
On top of the Springfield casino and another one planned near Boston, there could wind up being three casinos within 40 miles of each other near the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border. And there’s a campaign to build a casino in southern Maine.
“There will be some casinos that are just not going to make it," McGowan said. "And they’ll be closed.”
MGM and the commonwealth of Massachusetts want those Connecticut gamblers to come here—and to prevent Massachusetts gamblers from leaving the state. Now the Connecticut casinos are fighting back.
The Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan Tribes, which own Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, respectively, ran an ad supporting their plan to build a new, jointly run casino, which they say will keep Connecticut gamblers from heading north.
“An independent study shows Connecticut will lose more than 9,000 jobs, and $100 million a year in state revenue that goes to hold down property taxes," the ad says. "But we can save half the jobs and revenue by letting the Mashantucket and Mohegan Tribes build a new casino at their own expense.”
A 2014 Connecticut law allows the tribes to choose a site to build a new casino in the Hartford area, but requires them to get final approval from the legislature before moving forward. (MGM and another Connecticut tribe, the Schaghticokes, are each suing the state over that special arrangement). Basically, casinos mean big bucks for state budgets, and they’re all trying to get in on it, or stay on top.
“My advice for states is the same as the advice I give to individuals who gamble at casinos,” said Patrick Kelly, who researches casinos at Providence College. “There are no sure things at casinos. Don’t count on the casinos as a reliable source of state revenue. And the states that really become dependent on casino revenue do so at their peril."
Kelly said that unreliability has already been seen in Connecticut, “which in 2007 received over $430 million from its casinos. Eight years later in 2015 that figure has fallen to $267 million. Some of that is due to the recession. But other parts of that are due to increased competition from neighboring states.”
States like Rhode Island, New York, and now Massachusetts.
Kevin Brown, chairman of the Mohegan Tribe, which operates the Foxwoods casino, disputes the notion Connecticut has lost jobs because gambling is a declining industry.
"In fact, the reason we’ve lost jobs over the past two decades is because we’ve failed to respond to competition,” he said.
Brown said that’s exactly why this time, they need to respond.
“There’s a lot of competition—cross-border competition, state against state," he said.
"Every state is looking out for its vested interest.”
Copyright WGBH
