Coverage of casino opening
This newspaper has full coverage of Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati’s opening Monday
TODAY: Casino opens years after voter approval and construction delays
SUNDAY: Cincinnati casino to compete with racinos in Warren County, Dayton area
MONDAY: Casino employment falls short of projections
TUESDAY: Live coverage of casino opening
The opening Monday of Ohio's fourth casino realizes the end of a four-year project that saw construction stop twice and spanned two governor administrations.
Back in November 2009, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment to allow Las Vegas-style casinos to be built in the state’s largest cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo. Voters rejected casinos before that.
At the time the issued passed, the Great Recession was in full swing. Ohio’s unemployment rate in 2009 averaged 10.2 percent, government figures show.
“Ohio’s economic circumstances at the time were one of the factors that contributed to the passage of the issue,” said Eric Rademacher, co-director of University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research, in an email. The Institute conducts the Ohio Poll telephone survey, used to gauge pre-election opinions.
Circumstances have changed since then. As the Cincinnati casino makes final preparations for opening, developments in more recent years could mute some of the economic potential that Ohio’s new casinos promised in the campaign leading up to the 2009 election.
The Political Action Committee spearheading the initiative to open casinos in Ohio, the Ohio Jobs and Growth Plan, promoted to the growing number of unemployed people and cash-strapped local governments that casinos had potential to be a major economic boost.
“We felt it was a good time for Ohio to get in the entertainment of the gambling business,” said Charlie Luken, former Cincinnati mayor and chair of the pro-casino committee.
“The thought was that we were missing the boat” because business was going out of state, Luken said.
“The interesting thing about Issue 3 at the time is we weren’t locating these casinos in cornfields somewhere. We were working very hard to put them in urban areas where it would help revitalization,” Luken said. “What we did not expect of course at that time was that there would be seven racinos.”
Racinos are horse racetracks with slot machines.
After voters gave casinos the go-ahead, Republican Gov. John Kasich, calling the casino amendment a bad deal for Ohioans, renegotiated in 2011 with casino operators over taxes and struck a deal to allow for video lottery terminals to open at seven racetracks across the state.
The negotiations stalled construction, delaying Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati’s opening from end of 2012 to spring of 2013.
The deals yielded additional payments to the state. The agreements in 2011 resulted in Penn National Gaming Inc. and Rock Ohio Caesars LLC each making payments of $110 million spread over 10 years. The payments are in addition to one time casino license fees and taxes on revenues minus winnings paid to gamblers.
Penn National owns Columbus and Toledo casinos that opened in 2012. Rock Ohio Caesars owns casinos in Cincinnati and Cleveland.
With racinos, Ohioans will soon have 11 places to gamble with slot machines, Luken said.
“You can’t put another 1,000 slot machines in the state and say it won’t have any impact,” he said. “I still think the casinos will be very successful.”
In 2009 Ohio Department of Taxation estimates were that once all four casinos were up and running, they would garner gross revenues of $1.9 billion a year. Those estimates were lower if slot machines were allowed at race tracks.
However, new projections for Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s two-year state budget proposal released this February estimate Ohio’s four casinos will make $957.7 million in gross revenues a year, according to the state Office of Budget and Management.
Rob Nichols, spokesman for Kasich, said expectations for the casinos were set before Kasich took office. “We never viewed casinos to be the panacea to Ohio’s economic problems,” Nichols said.
“Clearly there are things that look very different now than they looked four years ago and that includes the competition that was allowed in in terms of those video lottery terminals and the changes in state funding for local governments,” said Jeff Rexhausen, senior research associate of University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center. The Economics Center did a study in 2009 commissioned by pro-gambling interests to project casino economic impacts. “None the less, if we had not done this, local governments perhaps would still have had revenues from the state reduced.”
Rexhausen said the new casinos economic impact is real.
“There’s no doubt that they’re having positive impact when you take a look at the amount of money they invested in construction,” he said. “There are gains in terms of overall economic activity and in terms of jobs and wages.”
Springboro resident Scott Fowler voted against the casinos in 2009, saying “it’s not going to end up being the savior everybody thinks it’s going to be.”
Horseshoe Cincinnati, located downtown at 1000 Broadway Street, the site of a former vacant parking lot, opens to the public 8:30 p.m. Monday.
Construction first started on the $400 million casino and attached parking garage in February 2011. More than 2,000 temporary construction jobs were created, said the project’s general contractor Messer Construction Co.
“Value-wise, it’s one of the largest projects in our portfolio at $400 million, and one of the largest this region has seen in the last two years,” said Jim Hess, senior vice president of Messer, in an email.
Building on Horseshoe Cincinnati paused in 2011 during tax deal negotiations, and stopped again at the beginning of 2012 when a floor collapsed. More than a dozen construction workers were injured by the accident when concrete was being poured for the casino's second floor.
The Cincinnati casino is expected to attract six million visits a year and carries 1,700 full- and part-time jobs, according to owners Rock Ohio Caesars. The casino’s independent restaurants employ about 400 more people, Rock Ohio said.
“I think it’s great,” said Moreen Cope of Middletown. “Definitely it’s jobs and it’s fun.”
Staff Writer Ted Cox and The Associated Press contributed to this report
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