Early Biloxi foe has change of heart

Casinos a boon to schools, provide jobs for 35,000 on Gulf Coast

By HOLDEN FRITH and HYE JEONG ~ Medill News Service - 9-3-03

BILOXI, Miss.

hen the first casino opened in Biloxi in 1992, newspaper publisher Roland Weeks warned that the town would soon face trouble.

“The bottom line is whether gambling is going to be part of Biloxi or Biloxi is going to be part of gambling,” he told the Biloxi Rotary Club.

In the 13 years since Mississippi legalized gambling, 12 casinos have opened in the sleepy Gulf Coast town founded by French explorers in 1699.

Weeks, now retired after 33 years as publisher of the Biloxi Sun Herald, has had a change of heart about casinos.

“I was wrong,” he said. “There are a lot of good things that have come from gambling.”

File photo

In the 13 years since Mississippi legalized gambling, 12 casinos have opened in Biloxi.

Fifteen years ago, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos. Now there are 432 in 11 states. With so many states in financial disarray, more are beginning to consider opening their borders to casinos.

Mississippi has raked in nearly $2 billion in tax revenues from casinos. Combined income from the 8 percent state tax and 4 percent local tax was $330 million for fiscal 2003, amounting to 10 percent of the state’s budget, and that doesn’t include the additional hotel, restaurant and sales taxes paid by the millions of visitors drawn in by the chance to gamble.

That kind of money makes a big difference to cash-strapped towns and states.

“When I came back to town in 1989, it was pretty sad down here,” said Rick Carter, co-owner of the Copa Casino, in Gulfport, Miss.

Unemployment was high, morale was low and the city was struggling to maintain basic services. The shrimp and timber industries, the cornerstone of the region’s economy, had been hit hard by foreign competition.

Copa Casino employs about 800 of the 35,000 Gulf Coast residents who work in the industry, and Carter says the economic benefits outweigh the side effects.

“It’s brought its fair share of problems but when you equalize it, all out, it’s been very impressive what we’ve been able to do here,” he said.

The casinos have been a boon to public schools.

“In the early 1990s, they were old, they were crumbling, they were in bad, bad shape,” said Denise von Herrmann, a dean at the University of Southern Mississippi who wrote a report in 2000 on the economic impact of the state’s casinos.

“Now we have beautiful, brand new, large, very high-tech facilities, and there’s no question that they were paid for by the local portion of the gaming tax,” she said.

But even those responsible for bringing gambling to Biloxi admit to a downside.

“We are losing the character of our community (and) our green space,” said former state Sen. Sandy Steckler, who helped create the gambling legislation. “We are losing a beautiful landscape.”

Some of Mississippi’s coastal towns have decided to do without casinos. In Long Beach, less than 5 miles from Gulfport, 60 percent of voters opposed opening the city to casinos.

Keith Rogers, who was the director of a now-dormant group that opposed the casinos, doesn’t like what they have done to Biloxi. “Whatever casinos want, they get,” he said.

He cited the Imperial Palace casino and its 32-story hotel, which was built despite codes limiting the height to 30 stories. And five years ago, he said, the city forced a church to move to accommodate a road widening to improve the flow of casino traffic.