Courtesy of: http://www.indystar.com
By: Matthew Tully
Let's look back on this Sunday to simpler times, say December 2004.
In those days, the city's biggest headache was finding a way to keep the Colts from moving to Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Las Wherever.
Back in those days -- before Indy was transformed into the Wild West -- Mayor Bart Peterson had an idea. Build a casino, he said, and rely on all of its lost quarters and lost dollars and lost souls to finance a stadium.
The idea survived about as long as a $20 bill at the roulette wheel.
Lawmakers laughed at the thought of a gambling palace in Downtown Indy. That, they said, would turn our little Mayberry into Sin City East.
More than 18 months after the casino idea died, it's time to bring it back.
Not for a Colts stadium, of course. We took care of that matter by taxing hotel rooms and rental cars and fast-food value meals.
This time, the casino idea should be aimed at a real problem -- crime. Our City of Chalk Outlines needs money, lots of it, for public safety. It needs the kind of cash gamblers have been dropping for a decade at casino boats in Evansville and Gary and Rising Sun.
"That's not a crazy idea," Deputy Mayor Steve Campbell said when I mentioned it.
The idea is distasteful, yes, given the social problems gambling is known to cause. But all of the easier options for dealing with our long-underfunded public safety needs are gone.
Something must be done.
To understand why, watch as the mayor cuts and scrapes to pay for police overtime. Or talk to city Controller Bob Clifford about the pile of financial problems facing the city.
There's hundreds of millions in police pension debt, for instance, and more millions in juvenile jail bills. The city needs money to speed up the court system, and to hire more police and prosecutors.
Meantime, a new and very expensive criminal justice complex is needed to streamline the system. But there's no money.
"We need alternatives for public safety funding, definitely," Clifford said.
Here's one: Casino Indy.
In 2004, the mayor predicted a pull-tabs casino would bring in $46 million a year.
That's a lot of police and prosecutor paychecks.
No doubt, this would be a hard sell in the hardheaded state legislature. The opposition would be fierce, and opponents would fail to mention that casinos and lottery shacks already dot the state.
The critics shouldn't scare the mayor, however. Their criticism no longer makes sense.
Last time, for instance, House Speaker Brian Bosma criticized putting a casino "in the middle of the most family-friendly city in the Midwest."
Tell me, though, did Downtown seem so family-friendly when gunmen turned it into a shooting gallery last weekend?
Quarter by quarter, Casino Indy could take care of a generation's worth of public safety problems and projects.
Yes, public safety.
I know it's not a new football stadium. But it's not a bad use of casino cash.
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