Keep casino at racetrack: committee
10-1 vote follows finance minister’s rejection of two-facility idea
A new Ottawa casino meant to compete with the one in Gatineau should keep shorter hours and be designed so people can’t spend as much money there, city council’s powerful finance committee decided Monday.
It should also be at the Rideau Carleton Raceway and be exactly like the 1,250-slotmachine operation the raceway hosts now, plus 21 table games such as poker and craps, the committee decided on a 10-1 vote.
The decision angered Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk, who wanted to make a casino the centrepiece of an entertainment complex in the west end that would subsidize the team.
It’s sure to disappoint the province’s Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., which started the whole thing as part of a provincewide effort to put more gambling closer to more people, rather than isolating it in remote rural racetracks as it is now. The OLG has already made up a shortlist of possible operators of a new casino in Ottawa, based on the assumption they’d construct a larger casino in a more central location.
Now, just before it invites them to make detailed proposals, the city is reneging on terms it agreed to last fall, when council ordered up an open competition with no place in Ottawa offlimits.
At the time, city council called for a new casino plan to come from “a Request for Proposal process that is fair, transparent, open and competitive and which provides all proponents, including the Rideau Carleton Raceway, an opportunity to compete within a level playing field.”
What the committee approved is not even anything like the downtown casino Mayor Jim Watson said he wanted more than a year ago, to try to get money back to Ottawa from local gamblers who go to the Casino du Lac-Leamy. It was time, he said then, to “repatriate that money and use it to create jobs here in Ottawa.”
Councillors are wrestling with the problem built into government-gambling: As politicians who get to spend some of the money it brings in, they want people to gamble a lot; as legislators who want to promote the public good, they don’t want people to gamble too much, and they don’t want people with gambling addictions to gamble at all.
They also like businesses to compete, provided the right ones win. In Ottawa’s case, the Rideau Carleton Raceway is where a great many slots players have grown accustomed to gambling and the raceway has become accustomed to payment from the OLG to hold slot machines.
Watson tried to talk the province into letting the city have two casinos — one at the raceway and one somewhere else — but Finance Minister Charles Sousa said no in a letter Monday morning.
“The OLG model was designed to maximize the commercial viability of land-based gaming across the province, and ensure the success of each gaming site, while balancing social factors such as responsible gambling,” Sousa wrote. “Factors such as proximity of a gaming site to others and to major population centres were assessed to determine the zones.”
In Ottawa’s case, the model said the city can support just one casino on this side of the Ottawa River, and that’s all it will have, Sousa wrote.
That ruling led to Monday’s strange compromise, in which the finance committee agreed that Ottawa should have more gambling, but asked the OLG to honour numerous conditions to keep it from being as attractive as the Lac Leamy casino. Or even as attractive as the raceway’s slot machines are now.
The conditions include closing the casino for at least six hours a day, which would force problem gamblers to leave. Like the Gatineau casino, the raceway’s slots are open around the clock. The finance committee said an Ottawa casino should restrict alcohol service to designated bar areas; the Quebec government last spring approved drinks service to its casino gaming floors. The finance committee wants the OLG to scrap its loyalty program for frequent gamblers, which is an industry staple, limit the maximum bets on any one play, and slow gambling machines down so people can only plug money into them so fast.
OLG spokesman Tony Bitonti said the agency will consider the city’s requests if the full city council approves them, and intends to continue looking for an Ottawa casino operator this fall.
Alex Lawryk, an executive with the raceway, said its operators will live with whatever they get, though he told councillors they’ll want to expand beyond that eventually.
“We’re hoping for that, yes,” Lawryk told Gloucester-Southgate Coun. Diane Deans, when she asked him straight out.
In the meantime, adding 21 table games and a makeover for the slots operation might justify the construction of a hotel by the track south of the airport, he said, but not the major redevelopment he has in mind.
One major argument for restricting a casino to the raceway is that it’s an important local institution, crucial to rural Eastern Ontario’s stables and related industries, that needs help to survive. Lawryk said actually, that’s guff.
“We don’t view gaming expansion to be a crutch that supports our core business,” he told the finance committee. “The question is not whether there will be racing at Rideau, but how much racing there would be.”
The raceway has been subsidized $13 million by the OLG’s slot-machine operation; now the province is working on a plan to subsidize Ontario’s horse racing industry some other way, with a final plan due this fall. The proceeds from hosting an Ottawa casino would be nice but not essential.
That left Watson grasping for a reason why the raceway deserves to be guaranteed the income from a casino by council fiat. Reporters asked him after the vote.
“As you know, the RFP process allows the city to designate one area or not designate another area to have a gaming facility,” he said. “That’s exactly what we started off doing a little while ago. The OLG told us they wanted us to be site-specific prior to the RFP going out so that’s what we decided to do. Other cities have done it, Hamilton, Kingston, and we’re doing the same as those cities.”
Reporters tried again: Why should the raceway be privileged over the Senators in the casino bidding?
“It was because we have a longstanding relationship with them, they have the zoning in place,” Watson said. “In many ways, the site there had support from the surrounding community and from the ward councillor and I think the jury was out in terms of having support for going into another location. ... The RCR had strong support around the council table and that’s the direction council is going in.”
Watson said he hopes to repair the city’s relationship with Melnyk, who has compared doing business in Ottawa to working in Eastern Europe, with conditions changing under his feet all the time. The Ottawa Senators have directly given $23 million to Ottawa charities since 1999 and have been instrumental in projects and campaigns worth $65 million more, Melnyk said Monday.
“This team has already gone bankrupt once. I’ve personally funded it. Eventually you sit back and say, ‘I love the game, but how much do I love it?’” Melnyk said.
A $500-million west-end entertainment complex featuring shopping, a new concert amphitheatre and other new developments would make his Canadian Tire Centre a year-round destination less reliant on hockey. He might take the city to court over what amounts to yet another sole-sourced deal with a business city councillors happen to like, he said.
City council is to take one more vote on its views on a casino on Wednesday. Ordinarily a 10-1 vote by the finance committee, which the mayor chairs and which is mostly made up of the powerful chairs of city council’s other committees, would be ratified with little discussion.
The casino question is so volatile, though, that anything could happen.