The Foxwoods Experience:
Could It Happen Here?

Located in a rural area of Connecticut, Foxwoods Casino has had a profound impact on surrounding communities, as reported by Saugerties Times writer Andrea Barrist Stern in an article entitled “Playing For Keeps” (September 2, 2005). The following excerpts from that article (reprinted with permission) summarize major developments: 

Crime has risen
A mere five years after Foxwoods Casino opened (in 1993), the sleepy town of Ledyard (15,000 residents) had risen to fifth place statewide in crime based on offenses at and around the casino, according to former Ledyard supervisor Wesley Johnson ….Gambling at the casino has led to bankruptcies, embezzlements and suicides.

Taxes have not dropped
Foxwoods has been anything but a boon to economic development for its host community and its neighbors nearby. "Sales tax hasn't gone away, property taxes haven't gone down and the state has still not been able to balance its budget," said Sharon Wadecki, a member of the Ledyard town council. Added Nick Mullane, first selectman of the town of North Stonington, "You don't have the governors of Connecticut or California [where Native American gaming is more widespread] advocating other states to embrace gambling and saying it's been good for their state." …. "The casinos have probably cost the state $3 to $5 for every $1 it takes in," noted Mary Beth Gorke-Felice, the owner of a bed and breakfast in Woodstock, Connecticut, and a founder of the Connecticut Alliance Against Casino Expansion. "So when people say Connecticut gets $440 million a year from the casinos, … it costs the residents three times that a year from land that's been taken into trust, taxes that aren't paid, businesses that can't make it, and services that are required."


Local businesses have been hurt
The casino has siphoned off money that local residents would have spent at non-casino restaurants, shops and entertainment venues and for other goods such as cars and appliances… It has also drawn down the labor force, making it difficult or impossible for some local businesses to continue - mainly because the casino offers health benefits….Since Foxwoods opened in 1992, one hotel, one bank and three donut shops have been the only new businesses in town, according to the Connecticut officials. Nor have the existing businesses been able to compete in terms of supplying the casino with food supplies and other items because of volume discounts the casino is able to get elsewhere. At the same time, many already existing local businesses closed or have been hard-pressed to remain open as a direct result of the casino's presence, said Wadecki. "A casino is difficult to compete with," said Mullane "A casino is a total destination resort. It's a city, a town, and a shopping mall with restaurants and everything else."


Affordable housing is harder to find
The 2004 median home sale price in that part of Connecticut was $236,500, according to a May 8, 2005 article in The Hartford Courant, part of a two-part series by Jeff Benedict, an attorney and the author of Without Reservation. Casino employees are showing up in homeless shelters or packing four or five families into a one-family residence. A local building inspector recently cited one immigrant who had purchased a condo and then divided the basement into five bedrooms he rented to casino workers.

Schools have grappled with teaching second-language learners
In addition, the presence of Foxwoods has become a problem for school districts like those in Norwich, where immigrant workers at the casino have settled because they cannot afford to live closer. Speaking some 32 different languages at home, these immigrants have created a burden for the schools required to provide English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) courses, remedial work, tutors, free lunches, nursing, and other special education services, while receiving no additional property taxes to offset the costs. The influx of this cheap labor has also affected the school district's ability to qualify for federal funding, which is now tied to test results under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation.


Hidden social costs have emerged
"The flood of slot machines into this region has given rise to a new class of improbable criminals - middle-aged women, married with children, gainfully employed, with no criminal history - now residing in taxpayer-funded cells," Benedict wrote on February 13, 2005 for another Connecticut paper, The Day. "White collar crime, bankruptcy, property foreclosure, extinguished pension funds, and divorce are hidden costs borne by communities nearest casinos."

Embezzling by trusted employees has become a problem
In 2001, the Ledyard tax collector went to prison for embezzling $302,587 to support her addiction to the slot machines… In 1998, the former tax collector for Sprague pleaded guilty to stealing more than $105,000 from her town over three years. She had worked for the tax collector's office for 14 years. And this year, a 25-year staff accountant for the town of Stonington was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing $257,000 in town funds for gambling. As a result, Ledyard and two neighboring towns now spend a total of $100,000 a year to have their books audited, according to Johnson and the other Connecticut officials.


Seniors and local residents are tempted beyond their means
A recent study by the Pennsylvania State College of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania found that among a random sampling of 843 people 65 and older who were surveyed, nearly 11% were "at risk" gamblers. In its own study on the impact of gambling in 1999, the federal government found that problem and pathological gambling doubles within a 50-mile radius of a casino.

Casino expansion cannot be stopped
Nor has the [Ledyard] community been able to check the expansion at Foxwoods, which originally opened as a high stakes bingo hall in 1986 before expanding to full a Las Vegas casino-type operation in 1992. The casino - which now has 340,000 square feet of gaming space in a complex that covers 4.7 million square feet, three hotels with a total of 1,416 guest rooms, 25 restaurants, a conference center with 25 conference rooms and 55,000 square feet of meeting space, a 4,000-seat arena and other theaters, a spa, a championship golf course, and shopping - is currently planning its fifth expansion. Why have Connecticut officials been unable to stem the casino's growth? "Municipal and state officials have no control over what an Indian tribe does with its sovereign land base," said Benedict. "If an expansion extends beyond the boundaries of local trust lands, communities can do something about it but a reservation is sovereign land. Not only can a tribe expand at will, they can build other things there that would be totally illegal or inappropriate a mile away, such as a nuclear storage site. This is the kind of thing that has come up elsewhere in the country."


Promises by casinos cannot be enforced
Developer Thomas Wilmot [the backer of the proposed casino in Saugerties] has implied in meetings with local businesspeople that he and the tribe would agree to limitations on the size of a casino in Saugerties and would obey local laws, but Benedict said such promises are useless "if history is relevant….You can say anything in this process but the fact of the matter is that municipal governments have no authority to enforce these kinds of promises. Just because a sovereign group says it will abide by local laws, when a dispute arises and they decide they don't want to, there is nothing to enable the town government to enforce their laws.”