It’s a Bad Bet, Sheriff Baca

As though they don’t have enough problems, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas are promoting a statewide initiative to allow slot machines in poker rooms and racetracks. Their endorsement is indefensible, and not just because some of their biggest political donors are behind the initiative drive and stand to profit from it.

It wasn’t the money from card-club and horse-track operators -- $50,000 to each over the years, with another $115,700 to Baca’s nonprofit Sheriff’s Youth Foundation -- that won them over, the sheriffs say. It’s the millions the initiative would earmark for law enforcement after forcing Indian casinos to give a larger portion of their profits to the state or lose their monopoly on Nevada-style gambling.

“I need more public safety money,” Baca told Times reporters who reviewed his donor records. “That is my motivation.”

Even aside from the appearance of impropriety, this explanation makes no sense.

“It’s a terrible reason” to expand gambling, says William N. Thompson, a professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an expert on the impact of gambling on communities. Thompson likened Baca’s support to that of an Ohio committee on compulsive gambling, which, promised a cut of the profits, endorsed an expansion of gambling in that state. The California initiative might provide extra money for fighting crime, Thompson said, but the expansion of gambling would mean more thefts, drug use, traffic accidents, personal bankruptcies and other societal problems to fight.

Thompson’s concerns are echoed by the California Police Chiefs Assn. and the sheriffs of San Diego and Alameda counties, who shunned the initiative. Baca counters that he has not witnessed negative spillover from Indian casinos, card parlors and racetracks in Southern California.

That hasn’t been the experience of organic farmers in the bucolic Capay Valley west of Sacramento. Motorists rushing to the Cache Creek casino have turned the two-lane road into a race course, complete with car crashes. Drug arrests last year were twice as high as in the nearby town of Davis, which has a population of more than 60,000.

Baca is also promoting a separate, countywide initiative that would raise the sales tax half a cent for law enforcement. He says he needs money for a sheriff’s department riddled by budget cuts. So do county hospitals and other local services struggling to survive the current state fiscal crisis. But ballot-box budgeting is at least partly to blame for the mess that the state, county and city governments are in. The gambling initiative in particular is not the solution.