A Temptation to Avoid

For years, gamblers, like sharks sensing blood, have been making runs at cities struggling with tight budgets, offering them quick, easy money by cutting them in on the action of poker games in exchange for city approval of card parlors.

What they never say is that gambling, legal as well as illegal, raises more problems for a city than it promises to solve. Westminster must remember that in fielding the overtures from gamblers who now want to build a card casino there. Westminster has enough trouble without opening the city to legalized gambling, which would no doubt open the city to other undesirable and illegal activity.

New York learned that lesson years ago when it got into the business of off-track betting. It intensified the climate for gambling, and police reported that the legal betting stimulated a 62% increase in illegal betting and brought more mobsters into bookmaking.

Such increased gambling preys heavily on people who can least afford to lose. It also increases police costs, invites corruption and takes an incalculable toll on the community that must deal with the social ills that gambling so frequently creates. A Times series four years ago uncovered card-cheating, loan-sharking, drug-peddling, bookmaking and lax law enforcement in poker parlors in some cities around Los Angeles.

There is no question that Westminster has a budget problem. Last year it considered, and rejected, the option of shutting down its police and fire departments and contracting for protection services from the county. It did levy a 5% tax on utility bills to raise more money.

It may be considerably more difficult to find ways to reduce spending or raise additional fees for city services. But those approaches are much to be preferred as proper and practical public policy than turning to gambling as a source of revenue. Cities should build on the strength, not the weakness, of their residents.

Gambling interests seeking a toehold in Orange County previously tried to interest Huntington Beach and Stanton in opening card parlors. Those cities rejected the attempts, as others that will surely be approached should do, too. Casinos are bad bets that leave everyone a loser, except the gamblers running the games.