lincoln taxpayers association - Twin River Casino

Stop Predatory Gambling.org, a national grassroots citizens movement to stop predatory gambling, will make its kickoff on Fri. Sept 26^th Sat. Sept. 27^th at the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, MD just outside of Washington, DC.

At issue is not whether people can gamble. It is not about people playing poker on Friday nights with the guys from the neighborhood or buying a square in the Super Bowl office pool. It is the practice of using gambling to prey on human weakness for profit: predatory gambling.

States from coast-to-coast now receive billions of profits from nearly 800,000 electronic gambling machines one machine for every 395 Americans. Instant scratch-off tickets costing as high as $50 are marketed and sold on practically every street corner across the country.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch will deliver the keynote address. Branch, author of Parting the Waters, the definitive history of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, will highlight how predatory gambling violates the core democratic principles of America - equal citizenship, public trust and accountability.

LINCOLN — There’s a 61-year-old Taunton woman who can tell you that, while visiting Twin River, one should never lose sight of her purse.

In the span of a few seconds early Sunday morning, such happened to the feisty Bay Stater, though she quickly reclaimed her bag while also “assisting” in the nabbing of Emily Gregory, 21, of 59 Tall Timber Dr., Harrisville.
At 2:30 a.m., police arrested Gregory on a misdemeanor larceny charge, and later released her with a summons to appear at Sixth District Court in Providence on Aug. 22.
According to Police Chief Brian Sullivan, the victim had been playing a video lottery terminal when she noticed her pocketbook was missing. As she searched at people around her, she “observed a young female carrying her pocketbook, so she went over to her and grabbed it from the suspect,” Sullivan said. “She also followed the woman toward the North Entrance doorway, and notified security as to what had happened.
“Security Officer Arthur Smick then followed the suspect outside,” he added. “She got into her vehicle, but (Smick) wouldn’t let her leave, and he contacted our officers.”

Feeling poor spurs lottery ticket purchases

Fri Jul 25, 11:03 AM ET

When it comes to purchasing lottery tickets, making people feel poor will prompt them to spend more money on a chance to become rich, American researchers said.

They found that people who were convinced they were earning a low salary bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets compared to others who were made to feel more affluent.

"When people are made to feel subjectively poor, they end up buying more lottery tickets which is somewhat perverse since every time you buy a lottery ticket, it's the equivalent of burning money," said George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who advised the research team.

"It's certainly paradoxical that making people feel poor means they are more likely to burn money," he added in an interview.

In a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making the researchers found that when people thought their earnings were below a certain standard, they were more prone to take risks and fall into a poverty trap.

"Lottery tickets are such a bad financial decision. Purchasing the tickets just makes their financial situation worse, which then encourages them to purchase more lottery tickets," Emily Haisley, who headed the research team, explained.

In the study people earning less than $100,000 a year, which was suggested by the researchers to be a low-income, bought 1.27 lottery tickets compared to 0.67 by people who earned more.

In a second experiment in the study, some people were indirectly reminded that everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery. The group given the reminder purchased 1.31 tickets, compared with 0.54 in the group not given the reminder.

"People who run lotteries have a lot of knowledge. They know who buys what types of tickets, they know who their customers are and their advertising certainly plays on the hopes and aspirations of low-income individuals," Loewenstein said.

A recent report by the Commission on Thrift, a project of the private, non-profit think tank Institute for American Values, said that U.S. households with incomes under $12,400 spend an average of $645 on lotteries.

(Reporting by Ashleigh Patterson; editing by Patricia Reaney)

The owners of the Twin River gambling casino are now offering a one time $500 million payment in exchange for lowering the amount of video slot revenue it pays to the state. Currently they pay the state 61% but now are asking it to be reduced to 25%, coincidentally (?) the same amount the Narragansetts had offered when their bid for a casino was defeated.

Claiming this is not a new form of gambling, attorney Gen. Patrick Lynch, along with Governor Carcieri's blessings, approved blackjack table games in an electronic form at Twin River. Five players sit at a table signaling their moves to a simulated — and in promotional photographs, blond and buxom — “dealer” on a video screen went in early this week at Twin River, generating nearly double the average daily income from one of the video slots: nearly $600 per seat per day. By the end of the day yesterday, another five were expected to go online. Another dozen are on their way.

The outstanding question as Twin River went ahead with the Lottery-sponsored installation of the machines this week was whether they fell within the constitutional requirement for a public referendum on any new “type” of gambling within the state of Rhode Island.

With the addition of the six new virtual blackjack machines — with five seats each — Twin River now has a total of 4,741 seats for video-slot and blackjack players, with authorization for a total of 4,752.

In years past, the defunct Lottery Commission provided a public forum for discussion and votes on any gambling expansion proposals. But with the dismantling of the commission in the name of separation of powers, there was no public debate on virtual blackjack.

“Try it for three months, four months,” he said. “Let’s see if it generates the revenue they say. Let’s see what impact it has on the town. Let’s dip our toe in first.”

Representative Deborah A. Fellela from Johnston District 43 is on the committee on separation of powers/committee on health education and welfare and last year introduced a bill to change the age of admittance at Twin River and Newport Grand from 18 to 21. It went down in defeat as the assembly feared it would lose the projected $8 million in revenue from these young kids. She indicated that she will be resubmitting it this year again.

Let's hope our younger people are spared the temptations of gambling in a state of the art casino designed to maximize the profit opportunity at age 18 by the passing of this bill.

The Town Solicitor, at the request of the Dec 18 town council meeting, ruled that Twin River requires a special permit every time it holds an event, something they did not do for the last Santa's Workshop held recently. Actually a small fair with over 150 vendors selling various items, this was determined to be a situation that required a special permit.

Kudos to Town Council O'Grady for bringing this to the attention of solicitor DeSisto.

Although the Twin River casino is a major revenue source for the state and to a lesser degree, for the town, there are many negative issues that have materialized as it transformed from the former Lincoln Greyhound Park to the mega sized, third largest slot machine casino in the country.

Much has been documented and written about the dangers of complusive and addictive gambling and now it has become a major stronghold right in the heart of our neighborhood.

See www.noslots.com for information on New Hampshire's efforts to reduce the impact of slots in that state.

See this letter to the editor published in the Valley Breeze August 23 from John Barr for some very important details concerning the tax assessment at Twin River.

Bought in 2005 for $435 million by BLB Inverstors, the new owners have poured $220 million into the former Lincoln Park and renamed it Twin River. Although the sale may never have happened if Governor Carcieri did not agree to an expansion of the slot machines allowed, the casino has evolved into the third largest slot machine casino in the country, and the host town is left with no control of the casino's future.

The wager: spend hundreds of millions of dollars on stylish design, finely appointed restaurants and a sea of flashing slot machines.

A decade ago, it was Mohegan Sun in southeastern Connecticut. Now Wolman -- along with two high-profile partners -- is taking a similar approach in nearby Rhode Island.

When Wolman's firm and its partners bought the Lincoln Park dog track a few miles north of Providence that had slot machines for years -- a lucrative franchise, one of only two slots venues in the Ocean State, they turned it into a Las Vegas-style casino, vastly expanded with entertainment and glitzy restaurants.

The old Lincoln Park is now Twin River. Greyhounds? They're still there, as an afterthought, a state requirement for Twin River to maintain its slot machines.

Wolman's partnership -- which includes Sol Kerzner, an international casino developer who was his partner at Mohegan Sun, and Greenwich-based private equity firm Starwood Capital Group -- outbid gaming giant MGM Mirage. The partnership, BLB Investors, now holds a gambling monopoly in the turf between Boston and Providence.

"We are opportunists. We are always looking," said Wolman, chairman and CEO of Waterford Group, a hotel management and development firm that is also master developer for Adriaen's Landing in downtown Hartford.

Contrasting the new Twin River with the defeat of the Narragansett Indians casino proposal, Chief Matthew Thomas, whose bid for a similar casion was defeated in a referendum, has said "I was just curious why no one cares about having one of the biggest casinos in the USA right here in little Rhody, more slots than in any single facility in Vegas! All the new eating establishments and great buffets in there, not to mention the entertainment venue...and a rewards program too!"

NORWICH, Conn. -- Since casinos opened in two small, rural Connecticut towns in the 1990s, there has been a sharp increase in local traffic, police calls, and drunken driving arrests, according to a Globe analysis, and the changes have spilled over into neighboring towns as well.

Over the last six years , calls to the Ledyard Police Department, a short drive from the Foxwoods Resort Casino, have almost tripled , according to local authorities. And in Montville, where Mohegan Sun is located, calls to police are up 38 percent overall since 1997.

Arrests for drunken driving have risen in both towns -- up from 38 to 87 in Ledyard since 1991 and from 39 to 113 in Montville since 1997. But the big reason for the increase in police calls, according to both departments, is not casino- related vices, but the sheer volume of people passing through these towns every day, creating more opportunities for problems just by being there.

Traffic is up as much as 275 percent near the casinos -- a source of frustration for many residents. With the traffic, though, has come job growth. And with the job growth have come developers scooping up land and immigrant families seeking steady employment at the casinos as janitors, cooks, and dealers.

Together, these changes have altered life in Ledyard, population 15,215 , and Montville, population 17,019 -- and in the surrounding region. Some say for the better, others for the worse. Either way, with two casinos rising into the sky just 10 miles apart, it is impossible not to notice."It's not as quiet as it used to be," said Mary Ann Maruzo , who lives in Norwich and works in Preston, a short drive from Foxwoods. "It used to be a real country town, Preston. Real country quiet. And with the casinos, there's a lot of traffic."