Easy Money
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No one likes the idea of putting the government in the “sin” business, but as a serious objection this qualm lost its teeth with the advent of Lotto. Ditto for concerns that the state wouldn’t know how to run a casino (hire pros, watch ’em like hawks) or that it would increase government corruption (we’re talking Cook County here, right?). The observation that there’s no precedent for a government-owned casino in the United States is true only if you’re willing to overlook Ho-Chunk and hundreds of other tribal-owned gambling venues. And beyond our borders there are plenty of models.
A Cook County casino could be the most profitable in the state, probably outearning even Elgin’s Grand Victoria, which had revenues of $417 million last year. University of Nevada professor William Thompson, author of Gambling in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Issues, and Society, says profits in a location like Rosemont will be limited only by the size of the facility. “Right now Illinois has a 1,200-gaming-spots limit for each casino license,” he says, which means “Rosemont might have 20 or 30 tables and a thousand machines.” What will essentially be a monopoly casino–it’ll be the one most accessible to Chicago’s dense population–is likely to be constantly full, but not necessarily with a better mix of gamblers than the Elgin or Joliet riverboats. “The atmosphere is not such that you draw in the high rollers for resort experiences,” Thompson says. “Generally, boats don’t bring in the players that bet $10,000 a hand.” (To meet the letter of the law, the Rosemont casino–miles from any natural waterway–would sit in the middle of a man-made lake.) Thompson estimates that 80 percent of revenue will come from the slot machines, and the players will come from nearby communities. A study he conducted in Illinois showed that the most frequent gamblers at riverboats were people who lived in the depressed areas nearby. As for the idea that a casino close to O’Hare Airport will grab dollars from tourists passing through, Thompson says, “It’s absurd. Nobody’s going to fly to a riverboat, and nobody at an airport for changeover is going to leave the airport [to go to a riverboat]. They’ll hook a bunch of people that live ten miles away.”
