Casino Developers Putting Their Money on Pomona : Economy: Firm hopes to develop card club in an entertainment complex. Area cities weigh tax revenues versus crime concerns.
It’s tough to find people who look like they’re actually having fun at Los Angeles County’s five card clubs. The sea of green-felt card tables in these casinos is dotted throughout with the stony faces of poker players assessing their hands.
Enter Tradewinds.
The group hopes to build the first card club in the San Gabriel Valley, proposing to bring more than a touch of Las Vegas to the Southern California gambling scene. Theirs is the most ambitious of five casino proposals during the past several months that seek to gain a toehold in the San Gabriel Valley.
The Tradewinds plan calls for a complex on leased land at Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona with the look of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” and featuring live bands, stage productions, ethnic restaurants, and rooms for playing video games and shooting pool. In addition to poker and Asian card games, the center would offer off-track, satellite wagering on horse races.
The main building at Tradewinds would be fashioned after a make-believe shipwreck turned upside down; palms and waterfalls would aim for a tropical air.
“If you went to the Bicycle Club (in Bell Gardens) and didn’t play cards, you’d be bored out of your skull,” said Jon Langbert, who is forming a corporation with three Pomona architects to build and run the casino.
“We’re looking at the trend in this country away from just games and toward a whole product with multiple forms of entertainment, like the new Treasure Island resort in Las Vegas.”
Langbert--now an employee of New Jersey-based Capital Gaming, which manages casinos on Indian reservations in several Western states--also sees the theme park aspect as his best chance for wooing customers in a business that’s getting more competitive as proposals for card clubs blossom around Southern California in general, and the San Gabriel Valley in particular.
* Another group in Pomona is proposing a club on farmland along the Pomona Freeway. The promoters say their casino, to be called Champs, would cater in part to Asian Americans, with a first-class Chinese restaurant and a variety of Asian card games.
The council paved the way last week for both developers to come forward with formal proposals. The council voted 5 to 2 to allow card clubs in areas zoned for light industry and at the fairgrounds. Also on a 5-2 vote, the council modified its existing gaming ordinance, first adopted in 1964, to allow dancing and alcohol sales.
* Casino promoters Michael Meczka and Frank Santin have vowed to take their casino proposal to Irwindale voters after a harsh rejection from that community’s City Council.
The partnership proposes to build the 40,000- to 60,000-square-foot club on Arrow Highway near the San Gabriel River Freeway. They say the club would create about 500 jobs and generate at least $3 million in annual gaming tax revenue.
* In South El Monte, one of Southern California’s lowest-income communities, the City Council voted 3 to 2 earlier in the month a to put a card club proposal to a vote in an Aug. 9 special election. A newly formed corporation called San Gabriel Valley Enterprise is behind the proposal, according to that group’s attorney, Jerry Neuman.
Neuman said the developers want to build a 50,000- to 70,000-square-foot building with roughly 150 game tables on about 22 acres south of the Pomona Freeway at Santa Anita Avenue, less than 200 yards from South El Monte High School.
He said the landowners, a joint venture of WB-Core Co. and South El Monte Associates, have offered to compensate the city for the cost of the special election to decide the casino’s fate.
More than 300 protesters marched May 12 at City Hall to oppose the council vote. Citing fears of crime, prostitution and drug use spawned by the card club, residents and Catholic priests demanded unsuccessfully that the council force card club proponents to collect signatures for a ballot initiative before the issue is put to the people.
* In Monterey Park, some believe a card club proposal by BCTC Development Corp. may resurface now that a new council is in place. BCTC officials did not return phone calls. But former Councilman Sam Kiang speculates that the company was funding opposition to him and two other losing candidates who oppose gambling in that town.
Kiang took the lead in opposing BCTC last year when the company made its tentative plans known. None of the three newly elected council members have opposed the prospect of gaming in town.
BCTC’s name popped up toward the end of the council campaign in the Monterey Park election when about 13,000 city residents received an official-looking but anonymous flyer printed in English and Chinese that warned of $10,000 fines and imprisonment for those who disobeyed voting laws. The flyers were traced to Steven G. Mott, a consultant to BCTC. Kiang said he believes the flyers were aimed at suppressing turnout by his supporters.
A 1984 state law placed the decision on card clubs in the hands of voters in Irwindale, South El Monte, Monterey Park and other cities that had no gambling law at the time. But because Pomona already had a gaming ordinance on the books before that law was passed, the council votes on card club proposals.
As they mull the casino issue, some council members question whether they’ve been dealt a royal flush or a losing hand. When it comes to approving card clubs, they fear, it’s a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Opponents say that, over time, card clubs breed crime and tarnish a city’s reputation.
“Pomona has a bad enough reputation as it is,” said community activist Bob Jackson, a council critic and onetime unsuccessful council candidate.
But Pomona is hurting financially, with one of the state’s highest utility tax rates (10%), one of the county’s highest unemployment rates (11.9% in February) and the city’s biggest budget deficit ever ($4.5 million).
As they grapple with these difficulties, council members are eyeing communities such as Commerce, which makes $1 million a month from its gaming tax.
“My feeling has always been that addictive behavior is not something you want to encourage,” said Councilwoman Paula Lantz, a self-described fundamentalist Christian. “But then I have to think, ‘Should the city refuse revenue from bars or grocery stores that sell alcohol and cigarettes?’ ”
Mayor Eddie Cortez says he is a teetotaler who abhors gambling because, like alcohol, it could have a deleterious affect on families.
The question they face, Lantz and Cortez said, is whether the money and jobs are reason enough to eschew moral concerns. Both voted for the card-club zoning and updated ordinance last week.
The Tradewinds developers want to build their 60,000-square-foot casino to capitalize on the thousands of weekly visitors already going to the Fairplex for conventions, trade shows and, of course, the County Fair in September.
The Tradewinds developers say they will spend $12 million to build their casino at the Fairplex, using local builders and suppliers. Langbert estimates that once completed, Tradewinds would employ about 540 people--mostly locals--and contribute $3.7 million in game tax revenue to the city the first year and as much as $10 million by the fifth year.
Tradewinds will also need a thumbs up from the County Fair Assn.’s board of directors, which was waiting for the council to decide on the plan before studying the proposal.
Meanwhile, businessman Leo Chu, owner of a women’s apparel company in Los Angeles called California Ivy, has applied for an operating license for a proposed 55,000-square-foot card club to be called Champs, which would be located on Reservoir Street south of the Pomona Freeway.