D.A. Joins Outcry Against Oxnard Casino

Calling gambling “fool’s gold” and a threat to Oxnard’s moral fiber, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury on Wednesday recommended that the city reject a Nevada corporation’s proposal to operate a hotel-casino for a landless Indian tribe along the Ventura Freeway.

The county’s top two law enforcement officials have now condemned the casino proposal. Sheriff Bob Brooks said Tuesday that the casino would foster crime, break up families and change Oxnard’s character.

Meanwhile, an Oxnard city staff report released late Wednesday said it was impossible to say whether a local casino would increase crime or cause social problems in the surrounding community. Staffers did find that a gambling hall would create hundreds of jobs for local residents and provide the city up to $14 million a year in fees.

In his scathing 29-page report, Bradbury urged the Oxnard City Council to reject at a May 8 hearing a plan by Las Vegas-based Paragon Gaming Corp. for a casino and 250-room hotel on 25 acres spanning the struggling Oxnard Factory Outlets and an adjacent field.

The report, titled “Gambling: The Cost to Our Community,” concludes that “bringing large-scale gambling to Oxnard would have an extremely detrimental impact on our entire county and ultimately do irreversible damage to the very fabric and security of our community.”

“This damage to people, families, economy and political institutions far outweighs the revenue it would produce,” the prosecutor added. “Revenue flowing from casino gambling is simply ‘fool’s gold.’ It is illusory over the long run.”

Specifically, Bradbury maintained that a casino would increase crime, foster government corruption and taint Oxnard’s image, while siphoning money out of city and county treasuries to pay for societal damage resulting from gambling.

After Bradbury voiced similar objections to a card-club casino in 1993, the Oxnard council voted 5 to 0 against the gambling hall. The district attorney’s office delivered Bradbury’s report to all five council members Wednesday, as well as to City Manager Ed Sotelo and Police Chief Art Lopez.

Council members were also digesting a lengthy city report completed Wednesday that laid out potential pluses and minuses of a casino project but backed away from a recommendation on it.

“The Paragon project,” the report said, “is an endeavor whose magnitude provides opportunities never before experienced by our city. However, the opportunities are also affected by impacts upon the fabric of the community.

“Current studies have concluded that this nation needs to know more about the impacts of gambling upon communities,” the report added. “Though they may not be necessarily good for a community, they are not necessarily bad either. Virtually no reliable evidence exists directly linking the casinos themselves to negative impacts upon public safety.”

Mary Rose, spokeswoman for Paragon and the 163-member Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians in Northern California, said there are plenty of good reasons for the City Council to approve the casino project.

“The proposed casino will be an overall benefit,” she said. “It will bring good-paying jobs, and it will be well-managed. I don’t think you’re going to find any of these kinds of problems.”

Council Members Still Divided on the Issue

California has a history of regulated Indian gaming, she said. “And we just don’t see an increase in crime near the casinos.”

She cited two studies paid for by Indian tribes that found substantial benefits from tribal gaming. A study of tribal casinos in six states, including the glitzy Cabazon tribe casino in Riverside County, found that police agencies have concluded that casino jobs help reduce crime.

The Oxnard casino would create 688 full-time jobs paying at least $8 an hour plus benefits, even before the hotel is constructed, she said. In addition, the casino would bring $8 million a year in casino fees to the city after it is fully operational in about three years.

Two of five Oxnard council members--Mayor Manuel Lopez and Councilman John Zaragosa--strongly objected to the city even considering the casino proposal. But Councilmen Bedford Pinkard, Dean Maulhardt and Tom Holden asked for the city analysis.

Holden and Pinkard have said they won’t make a decision until they hear a full report May 8. Maulhardt could not be reached for comment.

“I have personally spoken to Mr. Bradbury about this,” Holden said. “I respect him and I respect his opinion. But I’ll take a position on May 8 when we have a proposal before us and when the city staff has presented to me its analysis.”

Lopez said he has done his own analysis of the casino issue, and doesn’t need a staff report to know Indian gambling is wrong for his city.

“I agree with the district attorney 100%,” Lopez said. “This is kind of a replay of eight years ago. The issues are the same except here we’re establishing a little country within our city, which makes it even worse.”

Paragon Gaming, which was rebuffed by Ventura County supervisors in an earlier attempt to build an Indian casino at Channel Islands Harbor, now proposes a freeway-front casino that would open in two phases.

The 21,600-square-foot first phase would open six months after approval. That gambling operation would include 349 slot machines, 50 tables and a 15-seat snack bar.

After two years, a 50,500-square-foot expansion would add 349 slot machines, 100 gambling tables, a restaurant, office building and storage area.

Like the Channel Islands proposal, the Oxnard plan is an outgrowth of Proposition 1A, a ballot measure that amended the state Constitution to allow Indian tribes to operate slot machines and blackjack tables at casinos. A handful of proposals have surfaced across the state to build casinos in urban areas.

No Crime Links Found to Casino Backers

Bradbury maintains that opening one in Ventura County is an idea whose time should never come. Any fees gained by Oxnard would be money siphoned from the families of Ventura, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties, he said.

“For a portion of the profits . . . we would be selling the soul of this county,” Bradbury said. Neither Paragon nor the Maidu tribe has any connection to Ventura County, he said, yet “their profits would be at the expense of all Ventura County residents.”

The city report contradicts Bradbury, concluding that the vast majority of the casino’s $137-million annual revenue would come from out-of-town visitors, not local residents.

“Its revenue would be drawn mostly from people from outside the area, in effect injecting new money into the local economy,” the report said. “In economic terms, save for new payroll and annual payment to the city, this project seems to be remarkably self-contained, creating neither wide benefit nor harm.”

Bradbury said his investigation included background checks of principal casino backers, inquiries in cities with casinos and a comprehensive review of reports on the effect of gambling in the United States.

The district attorney found no crime links to Paragon Gaming executives, who are all respected gambling veterans in Las Vegas. Company President Diana Lee Bennett is the daughter of Bill Bennett, a self-made billionaire who co-founded Circus Circus Entertainment and is full owner of the new Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Bradbury acknowledges that studies are contradictory about gambling’s effect on society and crime. The General Accounting Office and the National Gambling Impact Study Commission have said no definitive conclusions can be reached about the casino-crime link because of the absence of quality research.

But Bradbury relies heavily on a subsequent report by the University of Illinois in September 2000 that he considers definitive. It studied the connections between gambling and crime by using FBI crime data from every U.S. county between 1977 and 1996.

“We conclude the casinos increase crime in their host counties and the crime spills over into neighboring counties,” the Illinois report said. “Between 3% and 30% of the different crimes in casino counties can be attributed to casinos. This translates into social crime costs associated with casinos of $65 per adult in 1995.”

The city reported that a casino’s effect on crime could not be predicted but that research suggests new crimes tend to be less serious. City staff members visited several communities near casinos--including Solvang and Palm Springs--to judge the effect of Indian gaming.

Although Palm Springs had no pre- and post-casino crime data, the report quoted an assistant city manager as saying the “crime and social ills predicted five years ago, when the downtown Agua Caliente casino opened, never materialized.”

In Solvang, near the Chumash Casino, City Manager Steve Casey said he was generally in favor of the casino because it provided jobs. The biggest problem associated with it was traffic, he said. A police official also said he had seen virtually no increase in crime since the casino opened, according to the Oxnard report.

The city report also cited a recently published case study of eight moderate-sized Midwestern and Southern cities that had legalized gambling casinos in the 1990s.

In those cities--ranging in size from East Peoria, Ill., to St. Louis--77% of surveyed public officials and civic leaders believed gambling had a positive economic effect, 65% felt their casino enhanced the quality of life and 59% were in favor of keeping their casino open.

More than two-thirds of the civic leaders said their city’s casino had little, if any, effect on crime.