I want to remind you, that all that glitters is not gold. While it appears to be a lucrative way to bring added revenue into Florida’s coffers, the opposite is true. The social costs far outweigh the revenue that casinos bring in. Locally-owned businesses go bankrupt because consumers have changed their spending habits to gamble at casinos.

If you are interested in creating jobs, why are you robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Clearly, this is the wrong approach to creating jobs. The types of jobs that you will be looking at are dealers, pit bosses, cocktail waitresses and hosts and hostesses. Is this the future that you want for our Floridians? Floridians deserve better.

“It is a total embarrassment to the Sunshine State, with its ‘Government in the Sunshine,’ that the Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering has completely evaded any public scrutiny or accountability and gotten away with its actions. The Division has denied every request for a fair hearing on this important issue and, to this day, refuses to be held accountable for its decisions. The Division’s lawyers are too busy creating legal roadblocks to the public’s effort to find out the truth behind the barrel racing sham.

The cruel irony of the ‘pari-mutuel barrel racing’ opening is that it is actually designed to replace jobs with slot machines, rather than grow our economy through the recognized benefits of legitimate horse racing. Because the City of Gretna’s economic development benchmark started near zero, its impoverished people don’t realize the economic development that could otherwise happen there with legitimate Quarter Horse racing and the thousands more jobs and prosperity it would bring, as opposed to the predatory slot machines that will now outnumber people, while concurrently killing Florida horse racing industry jobs throughout the State.

With such scrutiny being placed on ethics at all levels of government, it should send alarm bells throughout our regulatory, legislative and judicial system that the State of Florida is standing idly by while its taxpayer-funded pari-mutuel regulators are vigorously defending their unilateral sanction of ‘pari-mutuel barrel racing’ and sham horsemen’s organizations created by Gretna Racing and Hamilton Downs to shade their farcical activities.

It is time for the courts to step in and either stop, or call time-out on these rogue and illegal actions before it’s too late.”

So assuming that this is going to happen, and I’m not conceding that it has to: In the very least, let’s be sure that whatever is built is done so at the urban scale of the block, with walkable urbanism that is people scaled. Let’s build up our transit system so that it serves the region and that building up the car wasteland / car sewer scenario is averted. Let’s build a WORLD CLASS transit system. That way, when gambling fails becasue we have better things to do, the urbanism and transit system remains.

And please check Eric Fresen’s background.