In 1990, Colorado voters approved limited-stakes
casino gambling in the three old mining towns of Central City,
Black Hawk and Cripple Creek. Riches and Regrets: Betting On
Gambling in Two Colorado Mountain Towns explains
why.
Gambling was promoted as a way to save
towns, but it became a way to shred communities. After gambling
arrived, other things left – grocery stores, gas stations, garages,
free parking, chatting on the street, loafing on a bench and other
features of small-town life.
Author Patricia
Stokowski tells us gambling was not new to Gilpin County, home of
Black Hawk and Central City, since gold-rush saloons boasted faro
tables and roulette wheels. Long after the state clamped down, the
Central City Opera Association operated slot machines. So when some
local leaders pointed to a declining economy in the late 1980s and
promoted casinos as a solution, it seemed to fit. Everything would
be the same, except more stores would stay open through the winter,
and they’d have a slot machine or two stuck in some remote
corner.
It didn’t work that way. Casinos competed
for the entertainment dollar, which means big-time marketing, which
means more money and expertise than local entrepreneurs are likely
to possess. Further, property taxes are based on the “highest and
best use” of a parcel. Property owners discovered they either had
to get into gambling or sell out.
Nor did
gambling provide many jobs for locals: More than 90 percent of the
casino workforce commutes from outside Gilpin
County.
Some anticipated problems, such as more
prostitution and organized crime, never materialized. Stokowski
cites some benefits from gambling: Sloppy town administrations had
to clean up, and local youngsters had more job
opportunities.
Stokowski is an acute observer of
small-town politics and how public issues often get framed so that
there is only one outcome – the one desired by the local power
structure. For instance, the gambling proponents’ claims that
Gilpin County’s population and economy were in a tailspin. But
Gilpin’s population had been growing since 1960, and its per-capita
income stayed close to the state
average.
Stokowski notes that, “As a campaign
proceeds, claimants on one side of the debate divert attention from
their critics’ concerns by reframing the discussion around other
topics …” In other words, any persons who question the claimants
become themselves the object of criticism, and are labeled as
irrational, unAmerican, against progress, or even worse.”
As gambling took over, opera and museum
attendance declined even with more tourists. Some community
festivals died; others were contrived by the casinos. “Local people
do not provide community festivals and events for their own
enjoyment any longer; casinos produce the shows, but for very
different reasons,” Stokowski says – to get people to come to town
and lose money.
Casinos also appropriated and
revised the rich history of Gilpin County. As mining camps go,
Central City was never that lurid or
violent.
Riches and Regrets is not light reading;
its tone is academic. But it provides a detailed and intimate
portrait of ramshackle mountain towns that thought they were
getting just a few slot machines and poker tables. The
transformation utterly dismayed most
residents.
University Press of Colorado, P.O. Box
849, Niwot, CO 80544; hardcover, $39.95. 338 pages. Illustrated
with black-and-white photographs. – Ed
Quillen
Ed Quillen writes in
Salida, Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Riches and Regrets.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
