Casino Would Be Bust For Spokane Against Casino Gambling Leads To Social Bankruptcy.

Last fall, a three-fourths majority of Washington’s voters stomped an initiative that would have allowed unregulated casinos on tribal lands. Now, the nation’s huge gambling industry is trying via legal loopholes and slick corporate flackery to slip a tribal casino into Airway Heights, miles from the nearest reservation.

If this scheme works, the Spokane area eventually would regret the casino’s arrival.

Casino gambling - industry flacks prefer to call it “gaming” - is profitable only because it drains the pocketbooks of those its easy-buck hucksters promise to enrich. The money it rakes in is money families otherwise would spend on food, clothing, cars and less damaging forms of entertainment. In other locales, the arrival of casinos has been followed by bribery convictions of local politicians, losses at nearby restaurants and other local businesses, and sharp, costly increases in crime, family breakups, spousal abuse, drunken driving, and burdens on government welfare agencies.

While the industry is skilled at waving bankrolls under the noses of cities and tribes hungry for growth, over the long haul it is the wrong kind of growth. It pays mediocre wages, creates no useful products and siphons money from those who can least afford to lose it - the elderly, the gullible, the addicted and people in financial straits.

That is why the U.S. Senate voted this week to create a national commission to study impacts of the gambling epidemic. The industry fought this bill, but lost. It also has lost, lately, as various states voted on gambling propositions. Little wonder. Communities are learning that this booming business is a social and economic bust.

Nevertheless, the big Miami-based Carnival Corp. reportedly is willing to spend up to a million dollars to persuade our area to become gambling’s latest victim. It even hired publicist Kerry Lynch, a friend of Spokane Mayor Jack Geraghty at the P.R. firm Geraghty once owned.

The proposed casino would operate under federal laws intended to allow gambling on reservations - though the site is 40 acres that the Kalispel tribe bought just three years ago.

The technical nature of this shenanigan gives the governor a right to veto it. The Spokesmen-Review urges Mike Lowry to do so as a parting gift to Eastern Washington, where he grew up.

, DataTimes MEMO: See opposing view under the headline: Tribe deserves to take a chance

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = EDITORIAL, COLUMN - From both sides CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board