Frank Talk on Gaming a Wise Bet

Sitting through a city council meeting used to be a surefire source of excellent column material. Eventually, some member would say something nutty or juvenile or pointless. All I had to do was stay awake, make sure my pen had ink in it and wait.

So it was that I forfeited a perfectly lovely summer night last week and dropped in on the Garden Grove City Council as it debated whether to let its city manager talk to gaming interests. On its face, it sounds like a funny bit. Following a unanimous vote last year, city staffers were forbidden from speaking to anyone representing the gaming industry. If a high-powered Las Vegas casino owner were to call City Manager Matt Fertal and ask if the city wanted to make a ton of money, Fertal was ordered to say, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hang up.

No longer. The council voted 3 to 2 to reverse the ban.

Yet, to my shock, no one on the council made a bonehead remark. Nobody seemed to posture, openly distort things or insult anyone. At least, not in a mean way.

I’ve gone through all 12 pages of my notes and can’t find a single hare-brained thing said by anyone other than Buena Park Baptist minister Wiley Drake, who, in warning against allowing gambling in Garden Grove, said the city of New Orleans didn’t say no to the “sodomites” in its midst, so God rendered his judgment last week. .

The council took a higher road. All five members argued their positions with what struck me as common sense and conviction. Mayor Bill Dalton was projected as the swing vote and he reversed himself from last year, as did Councilman Mark Rosen, and voted to open communication lines. They were joined in the majority by new member Harry Krebs.

In some circles, Rosen and Dalton flip-flopped. Maybe I’m getting soft, but it didn’t sound that way to me. Dalton said it would “be an insult” to ignore the top choice of a citizen’s committee formed earlier this year to consider revenue possibilities. The majority of that committee recommended a casino/resort hotel.

A clear council majority seems to consider a casino a longshot, but Dalton and Rosen said ungagging the staff wasn’t incompatible with that belief.

I agree and would have voted with the majority.

However, members Mark Leyes and Janet Nguyen made sensible and forceful counterarguments in a losing cause. It’s perfectly legitimate to question whether a casino is appropriate for a community, and both said so. But neither thumped the moral tub in a way that departed from doing public business.

Leyes linked gambling to a bevy of potential criminal activity, but even if others disagree and could produce counterevidence, that doesn’t make Leyes’ argument irrelevant. Besides, he specifically said he wasn’t linking people’s penchant for gambling to morality.

“I’m just saying,” he said, “it’s out of character for Garden Grove.”

Nguyen was elected in November at 28 years old and is the first woman on the council in nearly 35 years. I’d never seen her in action before; I must say I was impressed.

She said she was philosophically opposed to gambling, but framed her argument along different lines. With the prospect of so many hoops to jump through leading to a potentially protracted time frame, she said, why devote any staff time to an idea that’s “too iffy?”

She accepts the possibility that a casino/resort hotel could generate significant revenue, she said, but doubted it could get off the ground quickly enough to help.

Rosen couched his remarks in philosophical terms, saying the city hasn’t gotten to where it is by silencing its staff. He argued that the city owed it to itself to explore the subject.

I love the casino issue. It’s rife with a potentially volatile mixture of politics and social mores, of potential local revenue versus uncertain aftereffects. It’s the kind of tough issue city councils should tackle.

From what I saw last week, Garden Grove citizens on both sides of the issue have the right people in place to do it.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.