The Missouri Gaming Commission has one casino license to award. The competitors still in the running are Kansas City at Sugar Creek, St. Louis at Chain of Rocks and Cape Girardeau. This is one contest St. Louis can stand to lose.
The Chain of Rocks developer is full of promises, all of the usual sort. But developer Jim Koman is not promising what matters most.
A casino at Chain of Rocks would change everything. Land purchases up on the bluff suggest positioning to build a hotel or other entertainment complex. Like dominoes, the once-green, oxygen-making, air pollution-mitigating, flood-fighting forests on the bluff would fall because they block the view of the planned megaplex from the interstate. Soon pressure for more "development" would ensue.
St. Louis never can resist the promise of progress. Volumes of plans sit on shelves gathering dust, yet the city always believes the promises. We have the skeletons to prove it: St. Louis Centre, Ballpark Village and St. Louis Marketplace. With few meaningful standards in the city and St. Louis County and the lacking foresight of Minneapolis and Chicago, the area would be dotted with tacky malls or strip shopping centers trying to look like the small businesses they destroy. Ultimately, the natural green will be gone. When it disappears, it will be lost to us for generations.
The area around Chain of Rocks is undeveloped. To a developer and, often to elected officials, this is a tragedy. To the rest of us, it is a green and forested sampling of what the founders of our city must have seen when they first glimpsed the great river bluffs.
North Riverfront Park and the Riverfront Trail extend a thin green finger to the Chain of Rocks, where the pedestrian bridge spans the river, inviting visitors to walk, fish, bike and reflect. It is a place to bring international guests to show our natural heritage that is unique in North America, thanks to the confluence of the continent's two largest rivers. To the eagles that soar over the bluffs, it is a place to catch dinner and rest.
Just beyond Chain of Rocks, north of Interstate 270, agriculture takes over the once-wooded wetlands, prospering from some of the richest soil on earth. Here is our food security.
Ecologically, the area would be forever altered if the Missouri Gaming Commission were to award the license to Chain of Rocks. Instead of maintaining its unique character as the Gateway to the Great Confluence, the area would blink and glow with neon and plastic, just like every other cookie-cutter project that can be found in Anywhere, U.S.A. And we will have gained nothing by becoming like dozens of other places.
Beyond objections to eviscerating the character of the area, there are the costs. The costs have not received nearly the attention of the developers' promises of revenue. There are no hard figures on who would pay for Missouri Department of Transportation upgrades to the interchange at Interstate 270 and Riverview Drive, or who would pay for the expansion of Riverview Drive (a state road), or who would pay for increased police and fire expenses in nearby municipalities and St. Louis County, or who would pay for expanding and maintaining an expanded sewer and stormwater network.
State Sen. Timothy Green, D-Spanish Lake, raised those concerns in a Missouri Gaming Commission hearing. No wonder the deal looks so good for the city. Push the costs to the county and the state, keep the revenue and you have a winning business plan. At a St. Louis Board of Aldermen hearing, the developers assured everyone that, "Illinois will take the hit," referring to the expected revenue they project to divert from the Argosy Alton casino. Yet they still insist that there is a significant "underserved" population in St. Louis County. Somewhere there are people in St. Louis County holding $40 million they have not found a place to spend. Really? In this economy? These figures don't pass the sniff test.
If the economics supported the conclusion that the market could sustain another a casino, which they don't, a smart city would promote a casino closer to its urban heart and repurpose abandoned industrial ground as done with River City at Lemay. St. Louis should not fall into a familiar, failed pattern of trading true gold for fools.
Fortunately, the Missouri Gaming Commission has only one license to award. Let's encourage it to send this one elsewhere.
Kathleen Logan Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
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