Council Vote on Casino Plan Delayed : Oxnard: A public hearing is set for June 22. Administrators had urged the city to start accepting card-club applications.

Saying they want to hear more from the public about bringing a card club to Oxnard, the City Council delayed action Tuesday on a staff recommendation to begin accepting casino applications.

Instead, the council set a hearing for the evening of June 22, when city staffers will report on the gambling issue and city residents can have their say.

“I wouldn’t feel good doing anything until we have a public hearing,” Councilman Bedford Pinkard said.

Top city administrators had urged the council to pursue construction of a card club by creating a task force that would accept casino applications, along with $25,000 deposits to pay for the city’s review.

But council members said that would be premature. Still undecided, Councilman Thomas Holden said, is “whether we want to go forward at all.”

Most council members said in interviews that they have heard little from the public about card clubs, and they are not convinced that big-time gambling would be good for their financially strapped city.

If community opinion is widely split at the hearing in two weeks, Holden and Pinkard said that they might want to put a gambling referendum on the November ballot so residents can decide the volatile issue.

Promoters are selling the casino proposal by emphasizing the 300 jobs and $500,000 to $1.2 million a year in gambling taxes they predict a large card club would create.

Council members, in fact, have said that the basic question before them is whether the tax benefits of having one of the state’s largest casinos would outweigh its crime-inducing potential.

A mini-hearing Tuesday reinforced that point, with two speakers favoring card clubs for financial reasons and three denouncing gambling as a corrupting influence.

“Don’t spend more money looking into a card club. It’s an invitation for corruption,” said Jane McCormick Tolmach, a former council member. “It would be difficult to find a single act that could cause more harm to Oxnard than inviting a card club.”

A second opponent, Tila Estrada, said a nearby card club would only encourage compulsive gamblers.

Estrada cited the experiences of a friend who she said lost her house and neglected her children to indulge a gambling habit, once returning home only after a three-day, four-night binge at a Los Angeles card club.

But small-businessman Pat Plew told the council: “We’re not discussing morality or vice. We’re discussing a business which equates to (1) jobs and (2) revenue for Oxnard.”

Plew said that gambling is pervasive, from the state lottery to the off-track betting parlor at the county fairgrounds. “People are going to gamble if they’re so inclined,” he said. “We have gambling right here, right now, in River City.”

Another speaker, Ventura Estrada, told the council that the card club issue is not all that complex: “You need money for your Police Department, so what’s wrong with card games?”

Of the five council members, only two have stated positions: Mayor Manuel Lopez in opposition and Councilman Michael Plisky in favor, if the city can limit approval to a single casino and ensure it is cleanly run.

Pinkard, Holden and Councilman Andres Herrera have said they are considering a casino only because it would help make up for $4 million in budget cuts next fiscal year.

Three casino promoters have expressed interest in an Oxnard club. The two who have submitted preliminary proposals each would like to build a 50-table, 50,000-square-foot club along the Ventura Freeway to draw customers not only from Ventura County but from Santa Barbara and the San Fernando Valley.

The closest large competing casino would be 70 miles away, just east of Los Angeles, though the city of Ventura has two four-table clubs.