Missouri State Rep. David Klindt (R-Bethany) comments on Missouri’s gambling.
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by State Rep. David Klindt
Last month, the Missouri Gaming Commission released its annual report to the General Assembly on the state’s gaming industry. The Commission oversees riverboat casinos, bingo, and horse racing in the state and studies how successful Missouri’s gaming facilities are compared to those of its competitors in neighboring states. What the report should say but does not, not surprisingly, is that gaming in Missouri is no great windfall for the state.
The Gaming Commission exists, in part, to help Missouri casinos be successful. Because Missouri’s casinos are on or near the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, they compete heavily with casinos in bordering states.
The Commission has been tracking the competitiveness of Missouri riverboat casinos with those of Iowa and Illinois. For at least the past three years, Missouri casinos have been outpaced in revenue generation by casinos in both border states. According to the Commission, this is largely due to Missouri’s special loss limit, which forces patrons to stop gambling when they lose $500 within a two-hour time period. Casino patrons, they say, choose casinos across the river rather than suffer such an inconvenience.
The Commission wants to know whether the loss limit really inhibits problem gambling and has asked the legislature to fund a study to find out. If it is nothing but an inconvenience, they imply, it should be abolished, just like boarding restrictions. And as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently quipped, this inconvenience costs our state, because “the more Missourians lose, the more the state wins.”
What kind of state revenue program is designed to benefit from its citizens’ misfortunes?
Regulating gaming isn’t a win-win situation either. It costs over $15 million a year to run the Gaming Commission, and the price-tag is growing because of the problems inherent in gambling, not to mention faulty accounting practices (a state audit last year revealed that the Commission improperly used $38,000 from the Gaming Commission Fund to finance its employees’ salaries). Currently, the state operates two hotlines for those who become addicted to gambling, 1-800-BETS-OFF and 1-888-GAMBLER. These hotlines provide access to professionals who can help gamblers deal with their addiction.
In addition, the Commission is a part of the Missouri Alliance to Curb Compulsive Gambling, which, among other programs, maintains a voluntary exclusion list for problem gamblers. This is a unique program that allows gamblers to place their names on a list that tells officials to arrest them if they are found in a gambling facility. Ironically, mental health clinicians have come forward to argue that the program actually hurts gamblers, because it fails to help gamblers take responsibility for their own problem. And in addition to asking for money to fund the loss limit study, the Commission is asking the legislature for extra funds to perform educational and outreach sessions on problem gambling, to conduct research, and to better staff its exclusion list program.
These are some of the costs of Missouri’s gaming industry.
It would be absolutely irresponsible for the state to foster a problem and then not help those of its citizens who struggle with it.
Missouri is obligated to help problem gamblers, but this expenditure illustrates how little of a bargain gaming really is. It is true that millions of dollars for education, but this is not worth the overall cost. When considering whether gambling is good for our state, Missourians should ask themselves, why is the Missouri Gaming Commission an organization within the Department of Public Safety? The fact that we need to be protected from gaming should help us understand that it is not good for Missouri.