Editorial

Nassau’s next red-light scheme

Posted

The Nassau Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation has decided, “after exhaustive study,” that Belmont Park is the best place to install 1,000 video lottery terminals.

Since that announcement, made on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s, when hardly a creature was stirring, county residents and elected officials, and others, have proclaimed either the proposal’s wisdom or its folly.

OTB wants Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office to approve its use of eight acres of state property on the western side of the grandstand in the 430-acre Belmont Park, in Elmont, to build a 100,000-square-foot building to house a thousand networked gambling devices that look like slot machines. In the meantime, OTB would build a smaller, million-dollar facility to let the gaming begin.

There’s another gambling facility 20 minutes away, the Resorts World Casino in Jamaica. Nassau County officials and residents who favor the Belmont VLT deal decry the loss of all those dollars headed into Queens when they could be spent here, to cover some of the county’s bills.

We think the county’s Belmont plan is a desperate measure, a short-sighted, quick-fix attempt to solve problems that were years in the making and deserve long-term thinking to resolve. The analogy to a gambler’s solution to debt is only fitting: Can’t cover the mortgage, the medical bills or the car payments? Let’s go to the casino and hope we can win. Every pile of money a habitual gambler loses motivates him to make yet another bet to restore his fortunes, and he usually loses again and gets deeper in the hole.

County can’t pay its debt? Not enough cash to refund property tax overpayments? Not enough sales tax revenue to pay the bills? Let’s take a chance that enough equally desperate folks will give us their money via VLTs.

The proposition, as we see it, is this: Does it make sound financial sense to rest the balancing of a municipal budget on gambling? Our answer is no.

We understand that the county is in enormous debt. It has been overseen by a financial control board since before Ed Mangano took the executive’s chair. And it’s tough to resist the revenue that comes from a casino’s glamour and glitz, its temptation for easy money and alluring amenities.

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