There is as old joke heard at political conventions: by the third day everything has been said but not everyone has said it.
It is now almost five pm and these hearings began at ten am. So, I’m sure that by now everything has been said but not everyone has said it. So I will be brief.
Casinos have been a bad deal for everyone in the city since the beginning.
By now you have heard all the reasons that casinos are bad for us:
• Gambling is a regressive form of taxation.
• Gambling leads to crime and prostitution.
• Compulsive gambling undermines families.
And casinos are a particularly bad idea on our waterfront:
• The casinos will bring all the burdens I just mentioned to strong residential neighborhoods
• The casinos will undermine our port, which has the potential for tremendous growth and the addition of thousands of jobs? Why would we exchange jobs that pay thirty to forty dollars an hour at the port for jobs that pay ten dollars an hour at casinos.
• The casinos will create tremendous traffic jams on already overcrowded roads. I tell my friends in Mt. Airy that it will still be faster for us to get to Atlantic City than to casinos in Philadelphia.
• The casinos will stand in the way of great plans to open up the riverfront for all of us, plans that will help us reconnect to the waterfront, to our past, and to the natural world.
• The casinos will harm our central business district by undermining our restaurants and entertainment venues.
Whether you agree with this analysis of the impact of the Casinos on our live or not, there is still something wrong with the process that might lead to massive buildings and garages on the waterfront. How can we bring these massive developments into our city without our government of the city determining whether we should have them and where they should go?
Much of the blame belongs on the state legislature, which created the awful process by which the casinos were sited. But most citizens in this city are disappointed by the failure of Council to take charge of this issue. Some members of council have expressed the fear that, if Council acts, the General Assembly will simply take away zoning control again. I say to you that you should act now and worry later. We opponents of casinos are prepared to fight in Harrisburg to protect what we have won.
Given our disappointment, we citizens decided to try to take matters in our own hands. We fought to get control over zoning back from the state. And we won. I’m proud to say that I helped lead that effort. And then we waited for city council to act and nothing happened
So again we decided to take matters into our own hands. I came up with the idea of petitioning council to put a home rule charter change on the ballot that would implement reasonable zoning restrictions on the location of the casinos. Hundreds of activists took those petitions around the city. Twenty seven thousand people signed the petition. As you all now, especially in this season, that collecting so many signatures on a petition is no small feat
So I suggest that Council has a responsibility to act in accord with the clear demand of a substantial number of the people in this city and let the voters decide in May whether these restrictions on the casino are reasonable or not.
And, also in keeping with the sentiment so clearly expressed by the residents of this city, Council should adopt the legislative package proposed by Councilman DiCicco, which offers us a number of ways to stand in the way of the casinos.