Sunday, February 14, 2010

Gaming Gambling focus group

At the invitation of a friend, I went out to the Littleton Area Learning Center, actually the old Littleton Coin Co building, out Union St past LaHoute's. There were maybe 25 people, including a number of political folk of my acquaintance. Under the guidance of facilitators, we discussed increasing legal gambling in NH. There is some legal betting at the racetrack, the discussion was about increasing it, opening Vegas style casinos, and allowing slot machines. After a whole day of gently facilitated discussion, the sense of the meeting was this. The downside of legal gambling, such as changing the tone of NH to a Las Vegas tone, facilitating compulsive gamblers into ruining themselves, the tacky nature of casinos, casino people and casino customers, far outweighed the possibility of increased public revenue from casino taxes. The projected revenue wasn't very big, and we assumed the projections were optimistic. Real world revenue will likely be less than projected.
Under the gentle facilitation, we never quite wrote all this down. Presumably the facilitators will write things up to suit themselves afterward. The whole thing was done by UNH people with state funding, maybe $30K of funding. They bought coffee and donuts and a sandwich lunch. It was an interesting day, but as a method of determining public policy it's kinda flaky. The UNH people have a free hand interpreting what was said, the people attending were by no means a representative group of citizens, we were all political people with various agenda's. Many of us started the session with a fairly neutral viewpoint and by the end of the session we had a much more negative viewpoint about legalizing more gambling.
Interesting euphemisms turned up. It's "gaming" not "gambling". It's "video gaming terminal" rather than slot machine. It's "racino" rather than race track.
For those more interested, Senate Bill 489 (SB498) is before the NH senate right now and can be seen online with a bit of googling.

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