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With four gambling initiatives on the ballot, along with a measure referred by our legislature, you can tell what Coloradans care most about: quick money.
At first I hoped that Amendments Three (add 11 towns and three counties, plus craps, roulette and baccarat), Four (14 towns, three counties, bets above $5), Five (only Parachute, round-the-clock gaming) and Nine (lower Platte Valley in Denver) will fail, while Referendum C (local vote required) will pass.
Recall that gambling was legalized in Central City, Blackhawk and Cripple Creek as a means to finance historic preservation and to provide cash flow to maintain three communities that faced hard times. The idea was that the ma-and-pa general store in the old Victorian building downtown could set a couple of slots by the dairy case and thereby get through the winter. Come spring, they might even have some money for the roof.
But once it becomes possible to feed a slot machine in a little town, it quickly becomes impossible to do anything else -- buy groceries, fix your car, go to church, get a cheap hamburger, gossip with a neighbor driving the other way while you're idling at a stop sign . . .
When gambling is legalized, all the routine interactions
that form a community suddenly evaporate. Owners of
commercial real estate discover that as their appraisals
rise, no tenant can afford to run anything except a casino.
It brings to mind the famous Vietnam statement: In order
to preserve the village, we had to destroy it.
Given those dismal results, a toxic waste dump sounds like a better deal than legalized gambling.
But upon reflection, I think there's a better way to go than defeating all four gambling initiatives: Legalize gambling everywhere in Colorado.
Without anything special to offer, Cripple Creek, Central City and Blackhawk would go back to being normal little towns where people know their neighbors. Why would any metropolitan resident endure an hour of tortuous mountain roads if slot machines were as close as the nearest 7-11 and there was seven-card stud at the PTA meeting? Sanity would return when the mountains are the only reason to go to the mountains.
If legal everywhere, gambling could not dominate anywhere. It would cease to be a novelty, and return to its traditional obscure haunts -- the office pool on the World Series, the card game in the back room of the neighborhood tavern, the slot machines downstairs at the Elks Lodge.
(Trivia question: Various luminaries of the music world recently gathered to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan's performing career. However, if I remember correctly from a biography, Dylan's first paying gig was not in 1962 in Greenwich Village, but in 1959, when he played piano behind a stripper in Central City, Colorado. Does anyone out there recall this? Can we set the record straight? Has the preservation promised by gambling maintained this historic site in Central City?)
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