Nov 16, 2017 4 min read

There’s plenty not to like about the Pennsylvania Legislature. This is the gang that regularly fails to complete on time its one constitutionally mandated duty: to pass a state budget by June 30. This year, lawmakers celebrated like they had won the lottery when they passed a budget on time. Only they didn’t. What was approved was a spending plan. What was lacking was how to pay for it. That took another few months, and most of that time, lawmakers weren’t even in Harrisburg laboring to complete their work.

If this were their only shortcoming, it would be one thing. But no. These folks fail on a regular basis to address critical issues facing the commonwealth. The public pension system crisis? They’ve kicked that can down the road so many times that it doesn’t even resemble a can anymore. How about the inequities in public school funding? They can’t be bothered with that. There was an excellent proposal this year to impose a tax on communities that rely on state police for their police protection. That went nowhere. The list could go on and on. When push came to shove, the Legislature came up with a revenue plan that relied on extensive borrowing and an expansion of gambling that the state truly did not need.

That’s not even the worst of it. A spot in the state Legislature should be a position of trust, but there are too many people in Harrisburg who cannot be trusted.

The latest evidence of that came as legislative leaders cobbled together their Frankenstein’s monster of a revenue plan. They approved the aforementioned gambling expansion to generate some of the money they needed to balance the budget. The measure allows for 10 mini-casinos across the commonwealth. The 12 existing casinos, including The Meadows, will have first crack at owning and operating these offshoots, and there will be 25-mile “buffer zones” around the casinos that are already in operation in which no mini-casinos can be built. But one of the existing casinos got an even sweeter deal.

Somewhere in the back rooms of the Capitol, someone stuck a little provision into the gambling legislation that took special care of Mount Airy Casino and Resort in Monroe County. According to a report by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the following language, which could be worth millions, was inserted in the middle of the 939-page bill: “A category 4 slot machine license may not be located in a sixth-class county which is contiguous to a county that hosts a category 2 licensed facility.”

What that legalistic gobbledygook really means is that Mount Airy, specifically, now has a greatly expanded buffer zone, because no one will be able to open a mini-casino in the neighboring counties of Carbon, Pike and Wayne. The Post-Gazette also noted that the provision will ensure that Mount Airy will remain “the closest and most accessible casino for the thousands of New Yorkers who flock each week to the commonwealth to gamble.”

The P-G’s recent report on this sweetheart deal states that no one will say who, precisely, put this little gift to Mount Airy into the gambling legislation, but Steve Crawford, the president of a lobbying firm that represents Mount Airy, said Senate leaders were the authors.

“As to who put pencil to paper, I can’t answer that,” Crawford told the newspaper. “But I’m glad they did.”

Lobbying money well spent, it seems.

In general, we don’t object to the existing casinos being given some protections from the effects of these mini-casinos, but it is shameful that one, and only one, of the existing casinos is being given the royal treatment.

We hope, and believe, that the other casino owners around the state will take this matter to court and have this gambling measure invalidated. Then perhaps our “leaders” can approve a bill that is transparent and fair to all, though with their track record, we sure wouldn’t count on it.