State Won’t Win This Bet

In the view of starry-eyed California Progressives back in 1911, the initiative petition was a tool of pure grass-roots democracy to write new state laws or constitutional amendments. Today, it’s more often used by special interests cynically at work feathering their own nests. Here’s one of the more benign examples: California has a state lottery because the companies that made lottery materials sponsored the ballot initiative in 1984, touting it as a source of new money for the schools.

This kind of cynicism has reached new heights as racetracks and card rooms, aided by law enforcement, seek to allow five tracks and 11 card rooms to operate as many as 30,000 slot machines in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. If the plan gets enough petition signatures, it will go on the November ballot. Its carrot to lure support is that it allocates 33%, or as much as $1 billion yearly, from the new slot profits to local police and fire departments and to county offices of education to help abused and neglected children and foster children.

Here’s the really cynical part: The initiative would give Indian tribes that operate Nevada-style casinos 90 days to negotiate new compacts with the governor and agree to pay the state 25% of their net revenue. If they did so, the tracks and card rooms would not get their slots. This makes it appear that the sponsors are playing good citizen by forcing the tribes to offer the state what some consider a “fair share” of their profits.

The tribes should be willing to pay more than they do now, to offset environmental and crime problems and pay for services in nearby towns. But a threat to put some slot machines outside tribal control is not likely to make tribal leaders faint and hand over the $1 billion a year or so it would cost to keep slots out of tracks and card rooms. So the question before voters really is whether they want the worst of both worlds: nothing more from the tribes and a huge expansion of casino-style gambling.

Two of California’s most prominent sheriffs are proponents of the proposal: Los Angeles County’s Lee Baca and Sacramento County’s Lou Blanas. A spokesman for Baca, whose department is scratching for funds, said, “Gambling is a legitimate business in the state of California. [Californians] have endorsed that.”

Californians did vote in 2000 to let tribes run mostly rural casinos, agreeing with the argument that Native Americans had been treated badly over the years and deserved a new economic opportunity. California does need to help finance more police, fire and children’s services, not to mention a long list of other worthwhile services. It is unfortunate that the state’s agreements with the tribes, negotiated by former Gov. Gray Davis, got nearly nothing from the tribes.

None of those facts is a good reason to open the state’s top cities to the crime, congestion and strife that come with casino gambling.