Neighborhood restaurants and bars will not offer the game of keno and the State Fair grounds will not regularly feature horse races now that the state legislature dismissed the second of two proposals aimed at expanding casino gaming in the state of Colorado on May 11th, 2010.
Both gaming proposals-Senate Bill 215 and Senate Concurrent Resolution 4(SCR 4)-were aimed to produce between forty million dollars and one hundred million dollars in financial support for university students at a time when legislators intend to give schools more freedom to increase tuition fee.
Sen. Chris Romer (D-Denver) was the main force behind both legislations, which he said was needed to help solve a three hundred million dollars higher-education budget deficit. Sen. Romer said that he tried his best to push these two proposals forward but he lost.
Sen. Romer said they have no plan to deal with the end of funding from the federal government next year. He added that the students will be the one to pay the price for their lack of solution. Federal stimulus money that is now supporting colleges will end on July 1st, 2011.
Sen. Romer said that the governor can approve expanded gaming without the approval of the legislature. Both proposals face a lot of criticism from the gaming industry, which predicted mini-casino facilities in the Front Range and serious damage to the communities now home to Colorado's casino establishments.
Katy Atkinson, the spokesperson for the Colorado Gaming Association, said that it is very obvious there was no solid support from the legislature. Atkinson said that everyone is interested in solving the problem on higher-education funding but this was not way to accomplish it.
SCR 4, which was postponed in the Senate state affairs committee indefinitely, would have let state voters decide in the fall whether to permit a horse racing track casino at the fair and keno in restaurants and bars in Colorado.
But the proposal ran into criticisms when it became clear the State Fair would have to acquire more land to construct a racing track and casino facilities banded together to oppose the plan.
It would have required a 2/3 vote of the legislature and would have to modify the state constitution so that all additional money from the gaming expansion would have bypassed the programs that are receiving funds from the lottery. Student aid would be the only program that would have benefited from the expansion.
The second bill of Sen. Romer was also postponed. The bill would have directed the Colorado Lottery to improve their sales to generate at least fifty million dollars for Colorado's general fund for student aid.
[10-08]
By John Sullivan
