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The Gaming Board's one sentence license awards
By Ed Goppelt
Thursday, 01/11/07
(1168552594176)
When it came to awarding the privilege to operate a Las Vegas sized slots casino, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) didn’t waste any words on December 20. Board member Ray Angeli’s motion to approve a license for the Foxwoods casino in South Philadelphia consisted of a single sentence. Foxwoods is expected to gross over $300 million per year and cost $560 million to construct.
Sixty miles away in Atlantic City, New Jersey offers a different model for licensing a casino. New Jersey licensed its last casino, the Borgata, in 2002. When the NJ Casino Control Commission voted to approve the Borgata’s license, the resolution was 34 pages long.
Part of the reason the PGCB could get by with such a brief resolution was that their decision left a lot undecided. The Board only decided who would get a license. They did not vote on the conditions the new casinos will have to abide by. Nor did they explain the legal reasons and facts which led them to approve certain casino operators for licensure and not others.
Residents will have to wait for the Board to get around to issuing its so-called “adjudication,” to learn what facts and legal reasons the Board based its decisions on. The “appeal window of 30 days begins with the order and adjudication,” said PGCB spokesman Doug Harbach. The “opinion will be known at that time.”
That’s not how it’s done in other states with legalized gambling. New Jersey regulators specified a total of 11 pages of conditions when they approved the Borgata’s license and operation certificate. In Nevada, conditions are always part of the license vote and decisions range from 2 to 100 pages in length, according to Special Agent Kathy Faust of the Nevada Gaming Commission.
According to Harbach “an adjudication is the formal written document setting forth the decisions of the Board and reasons for those decisions, and will be issued in the next couple of weeks.”
Persons who want to appeal the Board’s licensing decisions, such as first district Councilman Frank DiCicco, will have to wait for the adjudication before filing suit. DiCicco says he intends to appeal both the SugarHouse and Foxwoods’ licenses on procedural grounds, but says he is having trouble finding an attorney without a conflict of interest.
Even when the adjudication is issued, it may be years before the PGCB shares the license conditions with the public. “The conditions will not be sent to the licensee until all appeals are final,” said Harbach. “This is because the conditions are conditions on the licenses which may not be issued until all appeals are final.”
Harbach explained that the Board wasn’t actually awarding licenses, just deciding who would get them when they are awarded. When the Board met on December 20 it did so, not for the purpose of issuing licenses, but in order to be transparent: “This was not for show because the Act required that a public vote takes place pursuant to the Sunshine Law.”
While Harbach drew a sharp distinction between awarding and approving a license, Board member Chip Marshall was less fastidious. “before the Board announces it final decisions on the award of slots operators licenses..” said Marshall before recusing himself from a vote on TrumpStreet.
When asked how the public will be included in the PGCB’s process for creating license conditions, Harbach responded “The Board has received sufficient information to craft conditions for a gaming license.”
Residents disagree. “They’re not open to new information, but other people have been thinking a lot more about these issues” said Laura Lanza, a community leader from Port Richmond. Lanza thinks the Board should require the SugarHouse Casino to pay for a community bypass road which would shunt casino patrons away from neighborhood streets.
Lanza’s idea for a community by-pass road came from a 32 point questionnaire for casino applicants composed by the Northern Delaware Unity Coalition, a coalition formed to act on behalf of residents of Northern Liberties, Fishtown and Port Richmond. The Coalition declined to make the questionnaire public citing a concern that it might be used against them.
Lanza also liked Sen. Vince Fumo’s idea of requiring the casinos to fund a special services district (SSD) as a condition of licensure. “A SSD is an excellent way for a casino to have accountability in terms of distribution of assets, control for the community.”
Fumo submitted his comments to the Gaming Board on November 20, but withdrew them the same day because he had missed deadline for public comment. “It was after the public comment period, so he “withdrew” because it could not be accepted,” said Harbach. The deadline for public comment was June 2.
Councilman Frank DiCicco then resubmitted Fumo’s comments under his own name a week or two prior to the Board’s December 20 decision. “We would have liked [the Councilman’s comments] to have been included in the [Gaming Board’s] docket,” said Brian Abernathy, the councilman’s legislative assistant. “They were filed late.”
According to Penn Praxis director Harris Steinberg the Board has not contacted him about possible conditions. Along with Janice Woodcock of the City Planning Commission, Steinberg is leading the City’s effort to plan the future development of the Central Delaware riverfront.
Steinberg thinks the Gaming Board should require the casinos to participate in a planning process with affected communities “where everyone feels heard, an open process addressing issues of traffic, parking, access to the waterfront and signage and scale and density of public space.”
What license conditions the PGCB is likely to impose remains a mystery. After a lengthy interview conducted entirely by email, Harbach would only say “the conditions will be created to ensure that the mandates of the Act are satisfied.” Other than requiring a commitment to diversity, the Gaming Act imposes few mandates on the PGCB when it comes to regulating casinos.
The Gaming Act gives the PGCB broad discretion in regulating casinos including what conditions to impose. Section 1325(a) of the Gaming Act states the Board “the Board shall, in its sole discretion, issue, renew, condition or deny a slot machine license based upon the requirements of this part, whether the issuance of a license will enhance tourism, economic development or job creation, is in the best interests of the commonwealth and advances the purposes of this part.”