A pair of fives dealt a fatal blow to efforts to locate a casino in Terre Haute.
The 5-5 vote Wednesday of the 10-member Indiana Senate Public Policy Committee means Sen. Jon Ford’s Senate Bill 354 stalls in committee.
“That’s it for this session,” said Ford, R-Terre Haute.
Ford said the heart of his bill — letting Rising Star casino in Rising Sun transfer nearly 750 unused gaming positions to Terre Haute — is just “too big of an issue” to try keep it alive as an amendment to another bill.
“You’ve got to respect the committee and the process,” Ford said.
That process took just 56 days from Ford’s Christmas-week announcement that he would introduce the legislation until Wednesday’s vote.
While most community leaders quickly rallied behind the measure, there was some grassroots opposition. Last week, 60 people attended a presentation by an opponent of government-sanctioned gambling, and more than 20 people spoke out against the facility at a City Council meeting.
In the end, it was concerns about the impact on other communities that killed the proposal.
Like the Indiana casino industry in general, gaming volume has fallen at Rising Star in the face of competition from a newly authorized casino in Cincinnati and an expansion of video gaming in Illinois.
Full House Resorts had hoped to attract business from a part of Indiana viewed as under-served by casinos and from neighboring Illinois.
The company had said a Terre Haute casino would have created 750 direct jobs and 500 indirect jobs and provided $10 million of tax revenue to the city and Vigo County.
“I haven’t seen enough facts .. to look at you in the eyes and say is that good public policy for the state or is it bad public policy for the state,” committee Chairman Ron Alting, R-Lafayette, said.
Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, cited an Indiana Legislative Services Agency analysis that estimated 43 percent of revenue at a Terre Haute casino would come from existing gaming operations in Anderson, Shelbyville, Evansville and French Lick. He said the bill also provided special treatment for a Terre Haute casino on licensing fees and taxes.
“The last thing that I want to do is vote for a bill that I know very well could result in the layoff of people at the casino in my district,” he said.
Vaneta Becker, D-Evansville, said Tropicana played by existing rules when it invested $50 million in a new land-based casino in her city. She said the legislation would have created “a very unfair” advantage for a new casino in Terre Haute.
Alting, Lanane and Becker voted against the bill along with Jack Sandlin, R-Indianapolis and Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis.
Joining Ford in supporting the bill were Ron Grooms, R-Jeffersonville, James Merritt, R-Indianapolis, Mark Messmer, R-Jasper and Lonnie Randolph, D-East Chicago.
Recalling his own community’s efforts to establish casinos in the 1990s to boost the local economy, Randolph suggested passage of the precedent-setting bill might offer hope for other cities and towns that might benefit from satellite gaming facilities or other innovative economic development tools.
Grooms said he supported the bill because it would have activated 740 idle gaming positions and meant a net boost to the state’s economy.
Despite the outcome, Terre Haute’s efforts won praise from committee members on both sides of the issue for the strong show of support community leaders brought to Indianapolis -- an “outstanding job,” Alting said.
“The good part about it is the community came together and hopefully we can keep this momentum going and maybe have discussion about more economic development and what we can do in Terre Haute to foster that,” said Ford
“That’s something that we can all be proud of,” said Terre Haute City Council President Karrum Nasser.
This marks the second failed effort by Full House to establish a satellite casino. A proposal for a site of the former Indianapolis International Airport came was rejected in 2015.
”I don’t know what our next step is but I don’t think it’s to look for a different location,” said Alex Stolyar, senior vice president and chief development officer.
Noting that many of the state’s 13 casinos have different ideas for helping the industry recover, Taylor asked, “Why can’t we just all get along -- put it all together and let’s go and compete against Illinois and Ohio?”
How does the industry do that?
”That’s a great question,” said Stolyar.