10.21.07
N.Y./Region Opinions
Long Island
The Wrong Track
The odds of the Shinnecock Indian Nation’s building a casino at the Aqueduct Racetrack are long indeed. A tribal casino has to be on tribal land, and the Shinnecocks have no land in Queens. It also has to be run by a federally recognized tribe, which the Shinnecocks are not; their application for tribal status has not yet been approved. Although New York State has regarded the Shinnecocks as a bona fide tribe for generations, and a federal judge ruled in 2005 that the tribe deserved federal recognition, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is sticking to its own incredibly poky timetable for determining tribal status. Its decision on the Shinnecocks is not expected until at least 2014.
That is a long time to wait, and a long time to endure the games of brinkmanship and wheeler-dealing that have been played since the Shinnecocks first caught the casino bug several years ago. Their latest plan has an air of grandiose fantasy about it — revving up a dumpy racetrack with more than 10,000 slot machines, 350 gaming tables, 22,000 permanent jobs and $2 billion in revenue, about $400 million of it going to New York State. The fact that this putative gold mine would be in New York City, and not on Long Island’s East End, is a critical part of the deal: give us an Aqueduct casino, the tribe said, and we will abandon plans to build a casino on 79 of our acres in Hampton Bays, where local opposition to the plan is fierce and deep.
Let’s be clear: There should be no casino in New York City or the Hamptons, no matter who runs it. (Other companies are bidding for the Aqueduct gambling concession; the Shinnecocks’ plan dwarfs the rest.) This page has long opposed the state’s addiction to easy revenue plucked from gamblers’ pockets. The state should not be expanding gambling at its racetracks — not with roulette wheels, blackjack and poker tables, and not with video lottery terminals, the euphemistically named slot machines that are a gambler’s version of crack cocaine. There should be no casino deal with the Shinnecocks, no matter how large and tempting the promised kickbacks to state coffers.
Economic development is a separate issue; no one can argue against prosperity for the Shinnecock tribe, whose members have long struggled against poverty, drug abuse and limited opportunity. The tribe may find it hard to resist dreams of another Foxwoods or Atlantic City, and infuriating that its battle for dignity and self-determination is taking place against the backdrop of the East End, site of some of the more obscene extremes of wealth in America’s second Gilded Age.
But gambling is an illegitimate route to wealth, particularly for the government of a tribe or a state. It strews too many losers by the roadside, and is fraught with hidden costs. The Shinnecocks should give up their long, divisive, and potentially fruitless wait for that one big score, and turn instead to more sustainable, less damaging means of development.
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