:Vocalo.org

Lincoln Park resident and furniture salesman James Calendar leaned back into his chair, searching for words. Outside the Thomas Moser storefront, traffic zoomed through River North, a neighborhood that Calendar once called home. After ten years in the area, he decided to move. He said the district has devolved into something tacky—a Mecca, of sorts, for themed-restaurants and tourist traps. Calendar worried that the same trend might materialize on a macro-level if a bill in support of a city-owned casino in downtown Chicago is approved by the Illinois House of Representatives. “I think [the casino is] going to cheapen the mystique of it all,” Calendar said. “The dream is greater than the reality.” House Bill 2035, approved by the Illinois Senate in Sept. and currently being reviewed by the House, calls for the first municipality-owned casino in the U.S. and is designed to generate close to $1 billion in revenue to bridge Chicago’s widening budget deficit. According to the 2004 City Hall press release that announced the plan, the casino would “attract between 6.5 million and 7.5 million visitors a year.” Calendar painted a dismal portrait of post-casino Chicago. In his vision, tourism will increase while the quality of those visiting will decline. Museum, restaurant, and park owners will be forced “to alter their business to fit” a new and growing demographic. Cultured locales will become pricier, while lower-brow businesses will flock to the downtown area. “Once the casino comes in, there’s going to be some kind of off-shoot,” Calendar said. “There will be businesses that consider the casino a cash-cow.” In essence, he defined a culture-crisis. Chicago Crime Commission President James Wagner, an outspoken opponent of the bill, considered political corruption, governmental incompetence and crime the main glitches in the legislation. “There are so many investigations [of local government] now, that it would be ridiculous to allow this to happen,” Wagner said. “That the city wants to own the casino is all the more laughable.” Wagner also detailed a less obvious hiccup in the legislation: the Illinois Gaming Board, the would-be casino regulator, is understaffed and dependent upon the Illinois Department of Revenue. “The legislatures don’t want regulation, they want token regulation,” Wagner said, referring also to the fact that the Chicago Casino Development Authority will depend solely on a five-member board. According to Wagner, the Illinois Gaming Board must become an independent agency with more extensive personnel before the legislation can even be discussed. Based on Chicago’s storied crime history, Wagner also cautioned that the casino would run a legitimate risk of penetration by a mob gambling racketeer. While not enthused with the idea of big-city competition for the eight riverboat casinos he represents, Executive Director of the non-profit Illinois Casino and Gaming Association Tom Swoik maintained that his personal experience supports no connection between casinos and crime. “If you talk to the communities, you’d hear postive things,” Swoik said. “All the cities with [ICGA] casinos have decreased in crime.” However, in a recent study of the relationship between crime and casinos, which appeared in a 2006 issue of The Review of Economics and Statistics, a casino’s influence on crime increased steadily over time. Initially, casino communities maintained roughly equal crime percentages, but as gamblers exhausted funds, crime attributable to the casinos rose to anywhere from 5.5 to 30 percent. Swoik echoed Wagner’s concerns over the city owning and regulating the casino, saying that the relationship “throws all kinds of redflags” into the air. “I wouldn’t be as concerned about organized crime as I would be about the corruption of elected officials,” Swoik said. He added that the current legislation furnishes Chicago with an irrevocable gaming license, making it harder to halt corruption if it does indeed become an issue. However, he stressed that if regulated properly, a casino can successfully provide the city substantial revenue. His organization grossed over $100 million for respective local communities in 2007. Calendar understands the potential “economic value” of the legislation, but he believes that a casino better suits smaller communities, which need the revenue to subsist. Of Illinois’ nine riverboat casino communities, Aurora ranks the largest with only 162,184 people, roughly six percent of Chicago’s population according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “I’ve never really cared for casinos coming into [a] city,” Calendar said. “It always brings in more trouble than it’s worth.”