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Posted Oct 11, 2012, 12:09 PM
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In the wrap-up on Wednesday's casino motion vote in Ottawa, a preview of the debate that will unfold today at Hamilton City Hall.
Ottawa city council's sure bet on Lansdowne Park followed by shameful gamble on casino
Councillors blast secretive OLG process, then vote for betting house anyway
(Ottawa Sun, Susan Sherring, Oct 10, 2012)
It was easy to believe that after years of inaction, the revitalization of Lansdowne Park might never happen.
You couldn’t be called a cynic for doubting anything good would happen with what looked like little more than a hideous large asphalt parking lot.
But on Wednesday, a historic vote.
Council agreed to revitalize the park, in the hope it will become a tourist destination and a gathering place for all of Ottawa.
The vote didn’t come easy. The last council bungled the process, hooking up with the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group without ever putting the project out to others who might be equally as interested.
Despite the drama, Ottawans can now look forward to both a beautiful park with unique stores and restaurants and the return of the Canadian Football League.
It should have been a great day for council.
But then, the debate turned to another mega-project in the form of a high-end casino.
In that brief moment, council quickly went downhill into a simply incredulous debate on giving the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. the green light to choose a winning private operator and casino site.
Here’s a brief rundown:
The OLG has decided to close down slot parlours across the province hooked up with racetracks, including the popular slots at Rideau Carleton Raceway.
The OLG effectively subsidizes racetracks with a 20% cut of slots revenue. The province’s horse racing industry resents the word subsidy, but it is what it is.
So the OLG is going to communities like Ottawa, and asking if they’re interested in having a new casino in their municipality.
Problem is, that’s really all this council knows.
Here’s what they don’t know: Where the new casino will be located; how much money the city can expect to make; how large of a complex the OLG is considering; if there will be a hotel or entertainment centre attached to the casino; if the city really can change the OLG’s choice — and work solely on keeping the Rideau Carleton alive; or if the city could take more time to evaluate the situation.
All questions. No answers.
Even city manager Kent Kirkpatrick appeared uncharacteristically confused. Questioned by councillors, Kirkpatrick admited he didn’t know the answer. But maybe he could listen to the taped debate from last week’s committee meeting.
Mayor Jim Watson told council the city has veto power. That, unfortunately, is based on nothing but trust.
Seems Watson “trusts” the OLG to keep its word. Lovely, but not based on fact.
OLG president Rod Phillips refused to offer up a guarantee it wouldn’t fight the city’s decision when questioned by the media.
It seemed most councillors understood this was no way to make a major decision on the city’s future.
One after the next, councillors Mark Taylor, Rick Chiarelli, Diane Holmes, Rainer Bloess, Peter Clark expressed concern about the lack of information.
Taylor said it was like a business saying it wanted to set up shop, but not revealing its location or how much money it would generate for the city. As Taylor said, the city would never accept that.
Then, he voted in favour of it!
Chiarelli said the OLG was like a “smiling dealer asking the city to play” and then he, too, voted in favour of it.
Shameful.
Ottawa has no real power to stop the OLG if it chooses a site that fits in with the city’s official plan.
Trust them?
Clearly, most already don’t.
Yet for reasons that are inexplicable, with next to no information in front of them, this council has gambled away a big part of the city’s future.
From one big high in Lansdowne Park, to one big, huge low.
Ottawa city council votes 19-5 in favour of casino motion
Councillors divided on feelings toward gaming commission
(Ottawa Citizen, David Reevely, Oct 10, 2012)
Despite many councillors’ very vocal misgivings, city council decided Wednesday afternoon that Ottawa should have a new casino.
The 19-5 vote to tell the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to seek private-sector bids to build a new casino here was closer than the number suggests: many of the votes in favour of the idea came from councillors who warned the city staffers who’ll work with the OLG to treat the provincial agency and its plans with suspicion.
“I do not welcome you as a friendly partner,” said Bay Councillor Mark Taylor, addressing himself to the OLG. “I see you as an adversarial business interest.”
Several other councillors, such as Knoxdale-Merivale’s Keith Egli and Osgoode’s Doug Thompson picked up his language, though all three of them ended up voting the way the gambling agency wanted — along with Somerset’s Diane Holmes, who’s deeply concerned about gambling addiction and traffic problems, College’s Rick Chiarelli, who didn’t think he had enough information at hand to justify a vote either way, and Rideau-Rockcliffe’s Peter Clark, who doesn’t have much faith that gambling is a worthwhile industry.
“Let them go play in the sandbox,” Clark summarized. The OLG will come back with a specific proposal and maybe it’ll be worthwhile, though he doubts it will be.
The five councillors who actually voted against the motion were David Chernushenko (Capital), Diane Deans (Gloucester-Southgate), Mathieu Fleury (Rideau-Vanier), Scott Moffatt (Rideau-Goulbourn) and Tim Tierney (Beacon Hill-Cyrville).
Virtually all the critics were angry about the secrecy of the process for deciding where a new casino will go. After Wednesday’s vote, the OLG will seek bidders to come up with a shortlist, and then present city council with one proposal for what kind of casino a private operators wants to build and where. Formally, city council and the public will never see the shortlist of options, even though each of them is expected to include a specific location and plan.
Informally, however, in closed-door meetings, city officials will have a say. The city’s economic-development director Saad Bashir promised councillors that “staff will be thoroughly engaged with OLG,” which didn’t placate many of the politicians.
City manager Kent Kirkpatrick told councillors his staff have already had preliminary meetings with about five would-be casino operators — lobbyists from gambling interests across North America have registered on the city’s lobbying registry — and he himself has attended two or three of them. They’re interested in sites all over town, though Kirkpatrick said the dominant theme is sites inside the Greenbelt but outside the downtown core. The airport area is one of them, he said, in response to specific questioning by Deans, though he emphasized that everything is still very exploratory.
“I have no knowledge of any one of those consortiums having decided whether they’re going to respond to OLG’s call for proposals or what sites they might have in mind,” Kirkpatrick said.
As councillors pressed him, Kirkpatrick said he’ll speak to people at the OLG about revealing more information about the bidders before one finalist is presented, though after the vote Mayor Jim Watson dumped a bucket of cold water on the likelihood of that. Requests-for-proposals don’t work like that, he said, scorning the idea of having the various bidders compete for public approval.
“The RFP process, as you all know, they bring forward one proposal,” he said. “When we bring forward the RFP for light rail, we’re not bringing you a smorgasbord of candidates. We’re bringing one forward. The OLG will do the same. What councillors have asked for and what we’ll follow up on is whether is they’re willing to show us all of the bidders or what their proposals are. I don’t know if they would do that, because it’s not common practice in an RFP to have a contest among three or four.”
Councillors could reject the bid the gambling agency likes best, and then it’ll be up to the OLG whether it wants to present the city with its second choice or walk away, Watson said. But don’t expect to choose from a list of options, or any detailed public consultations beyond the standard City Hall committee and council meetings.
Although city treasurer Marian Simulik told councillors she expects a chance to negotiate a new deal with the OLG to divide up the proceeds from a new casino, the agency has said clearly it’ll only offer municipalities a share of the slot-machine take, likely something in the single-digit millions of dollars. The city received $4.4 million from the gambling at the Rideau Carleton Raceway last year; the agency recently offered “host cities” a slightly richer deal than that for existing slot machines and said those are the same terms it intends to apply to future casinos.
There’s virtually nothing the city can do to protect that gambling business at the raceway, Kirkpatrick and other officials made clear. The track and 1,200-machine slot operation there can bid to host the new casino, but the decision will be entirely in the OLG’s hands.
Moffatt, for one, is sure that this is the end of the raceway.
“It’s clear that Rideau Carleton Raceway isn’t their No. 1 priority,” Moffatt said, in the most impassioned council speech he’s ever given. “In fact, I don’t think it’s a priority for them at all.”
The zone where the OLG wants to put a casino extends just far enough south in Ottawa that the raceway operators get to bid, but it’s clear to him that the whole point of the OLG’s provincewide strategy is to close rural racetracks and open urban casinos.
“They have created the parameters to achieve what they want to achieve,” he said, by insisting city council ultimately take an all-or-nothing vote on one location, which he’s sure won’t be the raceway. The OLG plans to shut its slots there next March, and although there are negotiations underway to extend that deadline until a new casino opens somewhere, the writing is on the wall.
On the flip side, the mayor said he’s certain the agency would never try to force a casino into Ottawa against city council’s wishes.
From here, the process is supposed to move quickly. The city’s health and economic-development departments are to produce reports on how a casino could be expected to affect their work and present those at the same time as the OLG presents its chosen bidder to the city in the new year.
The chairman of the gambling agency’s board is Paul Godfrey, who is also the chief executive of Postmedia Network Inc., which owns the Citizen.
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"Where architectural imagination is absent, the case is hopeless." - Louis Sullivan
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