Another casino setback

Small town Massachusetts has spoken and it seems that many of them don’t want casinos. Milford, a MetroWest town of 25,000, soundly defeated a host community agreement with Crossroads Massachusetts, a casino development group led by Foxwoods Connecticut and Colorado real estate developer David Nunes.

 

The much-anticipated Milford vote deflates the state’s fledging casino quest. The turnout was extraordinary at nearly 60 percent, and the vote wasn’t even close: 6,361 to 3,480. Milford joins East Boston, West Springfield, and Palmer in rejecting resort casinos. Suburban locales in particular have become what the Boston Globe’s Mark Arsenault calls “the graveyard of casino dreams.”

Yet opposition to the Foxwoods plan in Milford had been particularly fierce and well-organized. In the days leading up to the vote, the battle only intensified. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission gave the Foxwoods plan conditional approval, subject to securing financing for the project.

Gaming commissioner Stephen Crosby raised questions about the independence of three-person management board that would have run the Bay State casino. All three of the prospective managers had links to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation that owns and operates the tribe’s financially troubled Connecticut flagship.

Which may be why late Sunday night Milford selectman Bill Buckley raised additional concerns about the financing agreement that Foxwoods had reached with Gaming and Leisure Properties, Inc., a subsidiary of Penn National Gaming, that was announced shortly after the commission’s decision. The last-minute jockeying led to a war of words between Buckley and Nunes over the timing of the selectman’s protest.

Yet most voters were more likely swayed by qualify of life issues than the complexities of financing agreements. The “no” coalition was buoyed by fears about crime, traffic, and threats to the town’s New England character. Its pink granite quarries and factories helped Milford prosper in the early 20th century. However, unlike some other former mill towns in the Bay State, the community never hit rock-bottom when the factories closed.

Milford today is a solidly middle of the middle-class town (median income: $60,840) that is not starved for new investment. The national retail usual suspects — Lowe’s, Target, Petco, and the like — can be found on the aptly-named Fortune Boulevard. The town hosts a fair number of moderately priced hotels. So the prospect of millions in annual payments and infrastructure improvements was not enough to sway voters to think about casinos as a municipal revenue source.

If anything, the vote was a decisive triumph for what MetroWest Daily News/Milford Daily News opinion editor Rick Holmes called the “Old Milford”:

“Unlike a lot of suburbs, Milford has allowed apartments to be built and held on to its affordable housing. Young Milford residents don’t have to leave town to find homes they can afford. They can stay in the hometown they love, raising their own children in familiar neighborhoods. That’s one reason Milford’s working-class character has survived so well. Milford has never gone upscale. Its politics are dominated by long-established families and lunch-bucket issues. The newcomers don’t vote in town elections or pay attention to Town Meeting.”

Casino supporters may grumble, but there have been persistent doubts that a small state like Massachusetts could support three major casinos in a region that is becoming increasingly saturated with gaming facilities. Outside of tourist magnets like Boston and the Cape and the Islands, there have also been questions about whether small cities like Springfield and even smaller communities such as Milford would draw enough entertainment seekers to make a casino’s economics work.

What the Milford vote portends may depend on what the future holds for resort casino proposals already in play in Springfield, Everett, and possibly Revere. There is little doubt, however, that the town’s decisive rejection will give new energy to the anti-casino forces working on an uphill fight for a ballot question seeking a wholesale repeal of the casino law.

–GABRIELLE GURLEY  

BEACON HILL

The Senate votes to hike the minimum wage on July 1, 2014, from $8 to $9 and then keep raising it annually until it hits $11 in 2016, the State House News reports. House Speaker Robert DeLeo, however, throws some cold water on the raise.

The Herald editorializes against a plan by state Auditor Suzanne Bump to audit corporate tax breaks.

MUNICIPAL MATTERS

New data show extreme disparities in education and income across the state, Masslive reports. Suffolk Construction CEO John Fish raised concerns about income inequality in a recent address.

A large crowd turns out at a Board of Selectmen’s meeting in Lunenburg to protest the decision to cancel the rest of the high school football season after a racial slur is found on one of the player’s homes, the Telegram & Gazette reports.

Gov. Deval Patrick was expected this morning to announce the awarding of state funds for two new projects in Brockton, including a new $27.4 million science building at Massasoit Community College and a $4 million redesign of City Hall Plaza.

Rochester selectmen voted not to support an article at the Special Town Meeting to create a Community Preservation Act fund, saying taxpayers are already facing too many increases in the town budget.

NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON

President Obama now says he will accept a piecemeal approach to immigration reform.

A Senate movement to curb filibusters of presidential appointments picks up steam.

Read Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s floor speech on the retirement crisis facing the country.

New York City launches a pilot project offering a special tax credit to help low-income, single adult workers with no children escape poverty, Governing reports.

The Globe‘s Brian MacQuarrie files this report from Dallas, as the nation prepares to mark this Friday the 50th anniversary of that day.

RELIGION

A Methodist minister in Pennsylvania says he expects to be defrocked after a tribunal found him guilty of violating church doctrine for officiating at his son’s same-sex marriage in Hull in 2006. The Rev. Frank Schaefer has 30 days to comply with the laws of the church’s Book of Discipline, which he says he cannot do in regards to gay marriage.

ELECTIONS

The Republican gubernatorial platform for 2014: lower state taxes and curbs on public-sector unions.

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

A battle is coming to a head between Tesla and the state’s auto dealers’ association, which wants to block the electric carmaker from selling directly to the public.

A draft of a state report laying out plans to improve and coordinate maritime facilities in five Massachusetts coastal cities says it could cost as much as $20 million to redevelop Fall River‘s waterfront for commercial, passenger, and visitor activities.

RIP, Blockbuster.

HEALTH CARE

Many of the people signing up for health insurance as part of Obamacare are discovering they are eligible for Medicaid, which could have an impact on state budgets, Governing reports.

The son of a Virginia state senator was given a mental health evaluation on Monday but released when no psychiatric bed could be found for him. He then stabbed his father multiple times and killed himself, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT

Environmental groups condemn state Rep. John Keenan’s bid to exempt a proposed natural gas power plant in Salem from regulatory appeals as a “sweetheart deal” and “poison pill,” the Salem News reports. But the Salem Alliance for the Environment writes a column in the Salem News arguing that the proposed natural gas plant is an integral part of a clean energy future as a backstop to wind and solar power. CommonWealth reported on the dispute last week, suggesting the battle is a fight over the state’s energy future.

The Buzzards Bay Coalition has dropped its appeal of the $366 million settlement the EPA agreed to to clean up New Bedford Harbor even though the advocates continue to insist it is woefully underfunded.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

A former top prosecutor for :Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has filed suit against Cruz and other supervisors. The ex-prosecutor claims he was fired after nearly 20 years in the office because he did not contribute to Cruz’s reelection campaign and questioned the office’s payments to informants.

Town Meeting voters in Essex approve the purchase of six tasers for police as an alternative to using firearms in confrontations with suspects, the Gloucester Times reports.

A man is arraigned in Wrentham on charges that he hit a man and a woman with his vehicle at a hotel on Route 1 and then dragged the woman under his truck for three miles to Gillette Stadium, NECN reports.

A court orders a Lawrence consulting firm called Pinnacle Financial to pay $240,000 in restitution and fines for violating an injunction barring predatory loan practices, the Eagle-Tribune reports.

MEDIA

Nate Silver announces a number of major hires as his FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis website with ESPN begins to take shape. It will focus on sports, politics, economics, science, and lifestyle issues, ESPN says.

Felix Salmon at Reuters offers a good, inside look at the changes taking place at Bloomberg News.

It’s back to WBUR for Christopher Lydon, 12 years after the erudite radio talker and station had an ugly divorce. Dan Kennedy welcomes him back.

Keller@Large says even though the Oxford Dictionary people declared “selfie” the word of the year, it didn’t feel that way around Boston in 2013.

And now for something completely different: Monty Python is getting back together for a reunion show.