For long enough we’ve been told the casinos are coming. We have heard this long enough that it should have taken hold. It hasn’t, despite the politics of fear in our city that encourage us to acquiesce to our continually the broken politics.
Now, however, anti-casino advocates have picked up an idea I suggested a few weeks ago, to put a legally-binding question on the ballot: do you believe slots casinos should be in Philly’s neighborhoods? Getting the 20,000 valid signatures we need to get this proposition on the May ballot can block the casinos and help us keep building a politics of hope.
So what’s the deal?
A while ago, after a protest against casinos, a small group of us were sitting in Redding Terminal Market. We were having lunch, trying to figure out how we could win. We all believed that putting two casinos on the waterfront was a bad idea both for these neighborhoods and the city as a whole. Casinos are known to increase crime and prostitution and reduce jobs in the areas in which they reside. The two casinos on the waterfront will create massive traffic jams and undermine the much better development we need there, as well as standing in the way of a substantial expansion of our port.
We were coming up with various scenarios at the state level, at the city level, or through other means. But most of us were focused since we were involved in winning the city’s zoning rights a few months earlier. That fight – which I led and which hundreds of people took part in – was successful in retaining for the city the right to decide where casinos should be placed in our city. Just like the City can say no bars within a certain distance from a school, the city can make similar rules about casinos.
We could, say, make a law that no casinos would be allowed within 1,500 feet of a residential or related-use facility (e.g., church, mosque, synagogue, school, house).
The problem is that all the strategies to do that would require a 2/3rd majority—that is 12 votes—on City Council. Council members have mostly been avoiding the casino issues, so we were not sure whether we could get those votes.
That’s when I remembered a rarely used method to also change zoning law: do it through a citywide referendum, literally letting the voters decide. It’s one the conservative right has used often and to great benefit. And now we could use it to protect Philly from casinos.
Here’s how it works
A proposed charter change is drafted and sent to City Council. It will go on the ballot if it receives a 2/3rds supermajority of 12 votes or – and this is the strategy we’re taking – if 20,000 valid voter’s signatures are presented, with only a majority of 9 votes.
If it passes, that proposed charter change goes on the ballot for the people of Philadelphia to decide. Each voter gets to decide if they want a) casinos within residential neighborhoods or b) to keep them out. The majority wins and becomes law.
This strategy is consistent with what we anti-casino activists have been saying all along, that the decisions to bring casinos to Philadelphia and where to place them here have been undemocratic from the start. I fought to restore our zoning rights. Now I want to force our Council to give the people the authority to decide whether and where we want casinos in the city.
Can we do it?
Absolutely. I’m asking all of you to get signatures on the petitions which can be found at www.stier2007.com/casinos. Dozens of organizations and civic associations are now jumping on board, from Fishtown Neighbors Association to Society Hill Civic Association, from Philly for Change to ADA, from the International Longshoremen’s Association to NABR.
By getting the signatures we need, and forcing Council to act, we can, once and for all, can overcome the sense of despair that has undermined the fight against casinos. And we can keep building the politics of hope that I have been talking about from the start of my campaign.