St. Louis Post Dispatch

Small-Town America 
Editorial Notebook Tuesday June 26, 2001

CRIME AND CORRUPTION? PROSTITUTION? PSHAW!

ON THE WEB SITE he operates (lagrangemissouri.com) Jerry Brandt has taken to calling his home town "the town held hostage by its police." "You get in your car in the morning, the first thing you do is check your headlights, check your tail lights, make sure everything's working," said Mr. Brandt, who operates a satellite TV service in the tiny northeast Missouri town. "The sign says 40, you drive 30. It says 30, you drive 20. They hired all these new policemen. They got nothing else to do, so they're practicing on us." 

That will change in a few weeks, when the Mark Twain Casino opens in La Grange and 12,000 visitors a week are expected to start showing up. A lot of other things will change as well, most of them driven by this one fact: La Grange, pop.1,100, will become the smallest city in the country to have its own casino and all the local money that it generates. Coahoma, Miss., pop. 254, is home to a casino, but shares its revenue with the county it sits in. La Grange won't have to share a dime of its $2.5 million to-$3 million annual local jackpot. Missouri's gaming laws stipulate that the "home dock" community keeps 2 percent of the casino's adjusted gross revenues, plus $1 a head from the $2 admission charge. That's why, for example, the city of Kimmswick won't share in the revenue created by the proposed Isle of Capri Casino to be located just north of the city limits. The "home dock" there is unincorporated Jefferson County.

In La Grange, jealousy is already rearing its head, according to Jenny Murphy-Reid, a retired bank vice president. "They laughed at us in the other towns around here," she said. "They're not laughing now." The town is blithely confident. The Missouri Gaming Commission contracts with the Highway Patrol to enforce the law inside the casino. Outside, La Grange's police force its numbers soon to double to 10 with a five-year, $1.25 million "grant" from the casino is on patrol. The biggest problem will be traffic, and as Mr. Brandt pointed out, the police are already practicing for that. "People talk about how gambling brings prostitution," said Kevin Preston, the casino's general manager. "But look around. Where are they go ing to go?" La Grange has no hotels and only one liquor store. It's a town where it's hard to get into trouble, and those who do will find themselves in for a long ride. The nearest jail is in Monticello, 15 miles away. Lewis County Sheriff David Parrish has complained that the casino is going to make work for him and his three deputies - drive out of the parking lot, you leave La Grange's jurisdiction and enter the county's - but that his office gets no money from gambling. He may get some help, but he's getting no sympathy. But what about long-term problems? What about being cozy with a company that preys on weakness? What about sin and degradation? In a word: Pshaw. "Let me tell you something," said Mrs. Murphy-Reid, who was among the first to propose gambling as the solution for La Grange's economic problems. "There's a bus that leaves Canton every month for Catfish Bend. (a riverboat casino in Iowa). It's senior citizens, mostly, and a lot of them go to church on Sunday. It's just a day, or night out. You got the troopers on the boat to run out the trouble. It's; probably safer there than anywhere.., else in town. "I myself, I go to church on Sunday, and I thought a long time about this, before I got involved. I figured, why should we pass it up? Why shouldn't we feed our coffers instead of letting it go to Iowa or Tunica, Miss.? It'll, bring a lot of jobs here, keep pay-checks in the county. How can it do anything but help?"

Kevin Horrigan', writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch

Wednesday: Adapt or die.