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Anyone want to weigh in the casino issue? There are a lot of local pols up here - Dem and Repub - that are going to be out of office come November because of the county's vote in favor of 5 casinos up here. My community -across the spectrum with sole exception of developers, real estate agents, local union construction workers and the local home fuel oil company - are furiously opposed to the casinos. I've spoken with most of the other small business owners and they were appalled by the pro-casino stance taken by our representatives.
It is seen as a last ditch effort for NY to resolve the outstanding lawsuits with the Indian tribes on Sullivan County's back (none of these tribes are indigenous to the county). Route 17 - the primary route from NYC to the Catskills - is still the same 2 lane road that backed up for days when Woodstock was held in Bethel. It backs up to Middletown now on Sunday afternoons and the normally 90 min trip to Manhattan by car can take over 3 hrs on Friday evenings. They are proposing several hundred thousand new weekend visitors and 10,0000-25,0000 new jobs. Our infrastructure cannot support this and we are told point blank by Albany that there is no money to widen or improve the roads. (Maybe in 10 yrs, they said.) The bottlenecks at Harriman and Middletown are going to be impassable.
Pataki is facing a 23 billion dollar shortfall for shoring up the NYC school system and I see this as a desperation move.
I attended a meeting with a local representative where a person employed by the military revealed that world-wide the military is dealing with the devastating effects of gambling addiction and that this person considered the addiction worse than that of crack cocaine - 100% recidivism and no treatment. 10% of the general population is at risk. The expert informed us that if the casinos did open, military personnel would be banned from going there. The poor and elderly are at greatest risk - and those groups make up a large percentage of the Sullivan County population.
Our school systems are already overflowing and there is no guarantees that impact fees will cover the costs of the influx of the children of immigrant workers. Around Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, 32 different languages were spoken by the children of workers and accommodations had to be made for their education.
This county has mismanaged it's resources for years and squandered many opportunities. I hear a few people yearning for the heyday of the Borscht Belt but these are not simply resorts - they are gambling establishments and the house always wins.
New York State has a constitutional prohibition to Class III gaming. It is in place because gambling was legal twice before and was rescinded by constitutional prohibition because they wanted to make it very difficult for subsequent generations to make the same mistake a third time. These Indian casinos are a way to circumvent that prohibition and subvert the democratic process.
"It will lower your taxes." I seem to recall hearing that Lotto would cut my school taxes too.
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