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It was no contest fT n the start, because somebod. .pped off Mississippi legislators that voters prefer to control their own destiny. They also figured out that repealing the law of supply and demand was beyond their powers.
Those truths eluded their Louisiana counterparts, who began, as they meant to carry on, with a dumb move, foisting gambling on an electorate furious that its demands for a plebiscite had been ignored. In Mississippi, counties got gambling only if they voted it in.
In Mississippi, no restriction was placed on the number of casinos, the market being allowed to dictate their fate. In Louisiana, legislators decreed there should be no more than 15 river-boats, thereby turning an operating license into a multi-million-dollar property, and only one land casino.
This did not necessarily boost public confidence in the regulation of gambling, especially when
When Harrah’s executives descended from Memphis armed with their wildly inflated revenue projections, the morale of the local populace got quite a boost. People who could believe those figures make the average resident of New Orleans look like Einstein.
Same with that other alleged business genius Christopher Hemmeter, who came a cropper with the almost instantaneous collapse of the River City complex.
The debacle threatens to get worse now that the pace of indictments seems about to pick up and a belated gambling referendum is to be held in the fall.
If voters decide to deep-six the half-constructed land casino, and Harrah’s emerges from bankruptcy with a plan to complete it and open for business under its 30-year contract, litigation is practically certain.
Mississippi, meanwhile, will continue to flourish, relieving many visitors from Louisiana of their cash. Indeed, we have been so outsmarted at every turn that perhaps it is unrealistic to think we might one day be in the same league as Biloxi.
Perhaps Poplarville is doable.
James Gill is a staff writer.
One of the prospering casinos on the Mississippi Gulf Coast: They're laughing all the way to the banks.	file photo
James Gill
I Where casino dollars are
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et’s face it, Louisiana. Some people just seem smarter and more sophisticated than us, more on the ball.
It’s hard to avoid a feeling of inferiority when you contemplate those smooth operators in more progressive states who always seem to know how to make the pieces fall into place.
Let us not despair, however. Instead of getting all eaten up with envy, let us see what we can learn from the guys with the brains.
Let us resolve that, one day, New Orleans will be regarded as on a par with cities that are now light years ahead of us.
Sure, it’s ambitious. But, if we put our minds to it, there’s no reason we couldn’t achieve a level of competence currently associated with cities that we hold in awe. Like Biloxi, for instance.
Before there was gambling, New Orleans held all the cards in the tourism business and hardly anyone bothered to visit the seedy, rundown Mississippi Gulf Coast.
some substantial and highly qualified applicants for riverboat licenses were passed over in favor of political hacks conspicuously short of capital and experience.
Harrah’s Entertainment had an abundance of both, but still managed to persuade itself, and state and local officials, that gamblers would fall over each other to lose money in New Orleans and that $850 million was a wise amount to invest in a land casino.
That was half-witted, and the benefit of hindsight is not required to say so. Plenty of people at the time diagnosed a severe case of wishful thinking because the supply of gamblers was clearly not there.
Without the hotels and restaurants that entice the suckers in other markets, and with so many rival attractions in New Orleans, it was even more likely that Harrah’s was setting its sights way too hieh.