Large Hotel-Casino Proposed for Oxnard : Gaming: Retired Camarillo businessman wants to offer gambling at regional convention center. But City Council rejected a card house plan last year, and key officials are still opposed.

Seven months after the City Council derailed plans to open a major card house, a former union organizer and restaurateur is floating a proposal for a regional hotel-casino before Oxnard officials.

Peter Bokron, a 71-year-old retired businessman living in Camarillo, said Monday that he is putting together plans to bring big-dollar gambling to Oxnard in the form of a sprawling hotel-convention center casino that he said could come before the City Council as soon as this summer.

But getting the plan by the Oxnard City Council or residents will not be easy. Several key city and county officials said Monday they still oppose large-scale gambling and the criminal element that often accompanies it.

Last year, the city received about 2,000 letters specifically opposed to card casinos--outnumbering those who favored the proposal 20 to 1, according to the city clerk.

“The public doesn’t want a card club in Oxnard,” Councilman Michael A. Plisky said Monday. “That was made perfectly clear.”

The gambling project was denied in June after hundreds of residents jammed the council chambers to oppose the plan. That same night, Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury announced a probe into a money-laundering and political corruption scheme he associated with the casino gambling project.

Two men involved last summer in proposing a casino were charged in October with money laundering by making illegal donations to local campaigns. That criminal case is still pending.

Frank Marasco, 48, of Ventura and Michael E. Wooten, 45, of Camarillo, who co-owned the now-defunct Darrik Marten Co., were charged with six misdemeanors each for allegedly making about $1,000 in illegal campaign contributions.

A trial is scheduled Feb. 22 in Ventura County Municipal Court.

Plisky’s 1992 mayoral campaign was one of four local elections that the district attorney’s office said received illegal contributions. Plisky said the hotel and convention center proposals do not detract from the influences 24-hour gambling would bring to Oxnard.

“I suspect all the rest of that stuff is just window dressing to get the card club approved,” said Plisky, who prosecutors said was unaware of the allegedly illegal contributions made to his campaign. “We’ve got hotels now that are barely making ends meet.”

Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez said Monday that he too would have a hard time approving any legalized gambling in his city.

“I personally do not believe in gambling,” Lopez said. “As to a specific proposal, I think I would have to reserve judgment on it. But the gambling aspect of it, I don’t think I could support.”

Even if Bokron’s project meets the approval of the City Council later this year, the Ventura County district’s attorney’s office maintains that it would also require the approval of Oxnard voters to open a casino of that scale.

“The addition of a hotel has no impact on our opinion regarding card club casinos,” Special Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald D. Coleman said Monday. “They are of questionable validity to the community.”

Both the district attorney and California Atty. Gen. Daniel E. Lungren said that under existing law, any card house in Oxnard would have to be approved by voters.

Despite that opinion, however, Oxnard City Atty. Gary Gillig has said the council could approve a card club without voters’ consent because the city allowed gambling before the gaming law went into effect 10 years ago.

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Gillig was not available to comment on Monday, and his assistant Paula Kimbrell declined to comment. But Gillig has maintained that he stands by his interpretation of the 1984 state gaming law.

Coleman refused to say whether the district attorney’s office would file a legal challenge to any approval of a card club by the City Council. But he did say “the city would be inviting litigation on the matter” by allowing one.

Bokron is a longtime businessman who has managed or owned a series of restaurants in the Oxnard area for many years. Prior to that, he spent several years working as an organizer for the culinary workers union before going into business for himself.

He opened the Old Timer restaurant in downtown Oxnard decades ago, and later moved it to the Wagon Wheel center before closing it in 1989. Bokron also ran the Golden Dolphin restaurant in the Channel Islands Harbor in the early 1980s before it went bankrupt.

The announcement of Bokron’s hotel-casino plan comes seven months after council members voted unanimously to deny another proposal that would have established Oxnard as a destination for big-time gamblers.

Bokron said the posh hotel-casino development would rival vacation resorts in Los Angeles and Nevada by offering a 164-room hotel, a 5,000-seat theater and dozens of specialty shops and offices.

“They should hang a sign over the freeway that says, ‘Oxnard: The Biggest Little City in California,’ ” Bokron said, in a reference to Reno, Nev. “Because that’s what it will be eventually.”

Bokron envisions an expansive center that would house not only a card club-casino of 45 to 75 tables, but also offer guests everything from fine dining and entertainment to first-class accommodations and convention facilities.

“Once you’re in that complex, you’d have no reason to go out,” Bokron said. “There’s places to sleep, places to eat, entertainment. You name it, it’s there.”

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The Oxnard Chamber of Commerce last year endorsed the concept of pursuing a gambling casino for the city in a split decision, but Executive Director Penny Hoffman said Monday that she did not have enough information to support Bokron’s project.

A consultant working for Bokron said the hotel and casino would generate about 1,200 jobs and substantial taxes for Oxnard.

“There’s going to be revenue coming in that this city needs,” said Mary Pallais of Pallais & Associates of Oxnard.

According to Pallais, the latest project is being touted by local business people with local ties and local reputations.

“The people involved are long-term residents of the county who have high morals,” she said. “People know them. It’s not just a card room. We’re looking to bring in the tourist trade.”

But that contention does not sway Jeffrey Brown, a local stockbroker who last year opposed high-stakes gambling in Oxnard.

“There’s enough negative fallout that (the hotel-convention center) doesn’t provide an offsetting benefit,” Brown said. “We don’t need gambling here. What we need is industry that would promote good jobs, manufacturing jobs.”

The minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Oxnard, who vocally opposed legalized gambling before the City Council last summer, said a hotel-casino would do more harm than good.

“It tempts people to spend money on gambling that probably is needed for basics,” said the Rev. James Bain. “You would have a lot of families hurt, and it would hurt the image of Oxnard.”

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But one of the applicants behind one of last year’s card house proposal said Monday that if the City Council is now leaning toward endorsing gambling in the city, it should hear other offers.

“If it’s going to be reconsidered, they should open it up for everyone,” said Wooten, one of the former card house promoters now facing misdemeanor charges in the contribution-laundering case.

“This is a proposal intended to bring gaming to Oxnard,” said Wooten, who also is an attorney. “It’s being dressed up with a hotel and convention center, but the issue is still the same.”

Despite the slew of opposition the other card house proposals met last year, Bokron remains confident his project will meet the approval of residents and officials.

“I know there are 50,000 more people out there that are for it,” he said.