Excerpted from a story, "Gambling Still Hot Issue," published 2.06.02 in the Honolulu Advertiser:
...Holomua Hawai'i, a group that includes investors in a Detroit casino called MotorCity, said the petition signatures had been collected in three weeks last April and represent growing grassroots support for gambling...
The major investors in the plan are Marian Illitch and Mike Malik, partners in the Detroit casino. Illitch's family owns the Detroit Tigers baseball team and Detroit Red Wings hockey team, as well as the Little Caesars pizza chain and other businesses. Malik is a developer and longtime consultant for Michigan casinos owned by Indian tribes.
In a video produced by Holomua Hawai'i, economists and others argue that gambling would create jobs, provide more government revenue, and revive the state's ailing tourism-dependent economy.
Holomua Hawai'i, named after the Hawaiian word for progress, is packaged as a grassroots effort, but it is in fact the creation of a Michigan public relations and political consulting firm hired by Illitch and Malik to promote the casino plan. The firm, Marketing Resource Group [owned by Tom Shields], spent nearly $11,000 lobbying lawmakers between January and April last year, records show.
But the company now risks a fine because it failed to file a lobbying expenditure report for the rest of the year, which was due at the state Ethics Commission on Thursday. Donna Halinski, a consultant with the firm, conceded that it had paid people to gather the petition...
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