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In November of 2009, Casinos No, a Maine interest group fulfilling its titular duty of working to deny casinos the opportunity to operate in Maine, released a new online advertisement attacking Hollywood Slots, a hotel and racino near downtown Bangor.
The ad is hardly popular, with fewer than 300 views on YouTube as of Jan. 12. If it were popular, Maine citizens would see the ridiculous nature of the problems in that Casinos No attribute to the existence of Hollywood Slots.
The ad says that since the racino’s inception in February 2005, “Bangor’s unemployment rate has gone from 4.5 percent to nearly 8 percent — almost 2,000 jobs have been lost.” It cites the U.S. Department of Labor.
The group fails to mention that the entire country has been bogged down in a recession over the past few years, prompting the national unemployment rate to shift from 5.4 percent in February 2005 to 10 percent at the end of 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is irresponsible and inaccurate to blame this on Hollywood Slots.
Further localization of BLS data also suggests that Casinos No was wrong when putting this information together. The BLS says Bangor’s unemployment rate was at 4.7 percent in February 2005. It stood at 7.1 percent in November 2009 when the ad was released. This is a large discrepancy — but one much smaller than the national average and the group’s slanted “statistics.”
A July 2009 article in the Bangor Daily News said that, at that time, the city of Bangor had “received about $6 million to put toward a new auditorium” from Hollywood Slots. The racino had also set aside $3.5 million to scholarship funds by then. The article said about 50 percent of net revenue “goes back to the state in some fashion.”
You can’t argue with the money the facility has generated. According to the BDN, by May 2009, revenue had steadily increased for six months. Gross revenue for that month was a whopping $64 million. An e-mail inquiry to Hollywood Slots regarding the number of jobs actually created and recent revenue statistics was left unanswered at press time.
The ad also says, “Calls from Maine to the National Gambling Addiction Hotline have gone from 115 a year to over 1,000.” I wasn’t able to confirm the statistic, but there are most likely other reasons for this. Online gambling is growing and is much more accessible than casinos. According to The Register, a United Kingdom IT publication, “Revenue in the sector is growing at a rate of 22 percent per year.” The same article cited a Merrill Lynch study that concluded the industry will explode into a $512 billion industry by 2015.
A 2007 University of Massachusetts study concluded that “about one out of every ten Maine residents has visited Bangor’s Hollywood Slots during the past 12 months, and Maine’s lone slot parlor appears to be luring a majority of its patrons from more than an hour away, demonstrating a potential for the Penn National facility to become a destination magnet for the region.”
The study also states, “About 30 percent of the individuals who have patronized Hollywood Slots have also visited either Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun during the past 12 months as well.” This illustrates that there are people in Maine who enjoy gambling, and will go elsewhere to do it with or without Hollywood Slots.
There are other bogus claims made in the ad that I do not have space to address in my column. I find this effort of Casinos No to smear such a positive influence (one is being proposed in Oxford County now) to be insulting to Mainers and detrimental to the economic development of Maine.
I don’t want my state to become Las Vegas or Atlantic City. I just think that casino proposals shouldn’t be voted against simply because they are casino proposals. They can do good things for an economy. All of the evidence points to Hollywood Slots contributing positively for the Bangor area and the state of Maine. Let’s not crucify their business without concrete evidence to the contrary.
Michael Shepherd thinks you should go on YouTube and type in “The truth about Hollywood Slots” for a laugh.
