When is 800 feet not 800 feet?
- Aug 6, 2008 - comment
As this issue of The Baptist Record lands in mailboxes across the state on Thursday, the Mississippi Gaming Commission will be in session in Biloxi to hear arguments that casino developers should be able to scrap the law passed by legislators in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that allowed them to move their gambling halls onshore.
The implications of such a move are massive.
In September 2005, just weeks after Hurricane Katrina flattened the Mississippi Gulf Coast and left thousands homeless and hungry, Governor Haley Barbour convened a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to first take care of the casinos. The result was a gambler’s dream: legislators allowed casinos to move off the Gulf waters on which they had been confined, 800 feet onshore as measured from the mean high tide line along the beach.
It was a real sweetheart deal for the gambles. Legislators even allowed the exclusion of any streets, roads, and utility rights of way from the 800-feet rule, which means that gamblers can move their tables of fortune considerably farther inland than 800 feet. The governor was only too eager to go along, quickly signing the measure into law.
As casino owners were scrambling to come ashore as fast as possible, anti-gambling groups including the Mississippi Baptist Christian Action Commission and The Baptist Record warned that the new law was just the next step in the gamblers’ grand plan to take over the state. Observers predicted that the 800-feet rule would soon be challenged, and they were right.
RW Development is building South Beach Biloxi, a large mixed-use development that includes a proposed casino at its core. The company is petitioning the Mississippi Gaming Commission to redefine current law to favor their future casino at an inland site that is clearly not a legal location under state law. RW Development knows that, and the Gaming Commission knows that.
The City of Biloxi has already caved to the gamblers and endorsed RW Development’s scheme to get around the law.
“The key issue is control of the land from the mean high tide water line inland 800 feet,” said former state land commissioner John Ed Ainsworth in a July 6 article in The Clarion Ledger newspaper in Jackson.
Ainsworth, now a managing member of the Caillavet Street Development Group in Biloxi, is a gambling supporter who lobbied hard for passage of the special legislation that allowed casinos to move onshore. Still, Ainsworth calls it like he sees it with regard to the RW Development scheme.
“Gaming Commission regulations require that the applicant own or lease the land from the water line to the location of the casino and that the area be controlled by the applicant and an integral part of the project. If there is public sand beach between the high water line and the casino, it is impossible to comply with that regulation,” he told The Clarion Ledger.
That’s exactly the case with RW Development. There’s a public beach in their way that they neither own, lease, nor control.
“RW will likely attempt to get around the control issue by claiming that you don’t measure from the water’s edge, as it presently exists but from the ‘toe’ of the sea wall, which is several hundred feet north of the present high water line,” Ainsworth told The Clarion Ledger.
Ainsworth didn’t predict which way the Gaming Commission would vote but he did say in The Clarion Ledger article, “If they approve the site without changing the regulation, the anti-gaming groups will probably file suit. They will probably sue if they approve under any conditions.”
What a mess, and we have our governor and legislators to thank for it. Since the first, small riverboat casinos opened along the Mississippi River in the early 1990s, the gamblers have calculated and contrived to move farther and farther inland. That fact is inarguable; if not, then why aren’t they still on their small riverboats?
Regardless of the outcome of RW Development hearing on Thursday, be assured that the gambling/political complex in Mississippi will not rest until there are slot machines and blackjack tables as far north as the Tennessee state line. Their ultimate, unmistakable goal is to control the State of Mississippi as they control the State of Nevada.
Don’t believe it? Just keep reading the news—and keep an 800-feet tape measure handy.
This article is reprinted from the July 17, 2008, issue of The Baptist Record, the newspaper of the Mississippi Baptist Convention.
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