Citizens of North Stonington, Conn. know to avoid Route 2, also known as “Casino road.”
Driving is a bit treacherous on this road in southeastern Connecticut, as a sort of tunnel vision afflicts many drivers when they see the brown and blue signs marking the distance to Foxwoods Resort and Casino.
Nick Mullane, the first selectman of North Stonington, says bad drivers are not the only problem Foxwoods brings to his town.
“They call it a resort casino – I call it a gambling hall and bar,” he said. “It’s a collection of losers.”
As for dangerous drivers, Mullane says he has felt their impact in his personal life – his wife was once rear-ended by a casino patron who had not slept in 36 hours.
The main access road for the world’s largest casino, Route 2 is a windy two-lane highway cutting a swath through the Connecticut woods, connecting Foxwoods to Interstate 95 and the rest of the East Coast. Traffic on the road has increased three fold since Foxwoods opened in 1992, according to a casino impact statement the North Stonington town council prepared in 2001.
Today, 25,000 cars, trucks and tour buses travel Route 2 every day, bringing in almost 60,000 visitors and employees to its six casinos and three hotels. Foxwoods is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For Massachusetts residents, the story of Route 2 and its bedroom communities of North Stonington and nearby Ledyard may serve as a vision of the future. The Massachusetts legislature is considering a variety of gambling measures to boost the economy and state revenues, ranging from approving slot machines in racetracks to permitting mega-casinos like Connecticut’s Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun.
The first of the two Connecticut casinos to open, Foxwoods has been a windfall for the state. According to a 2001 study of tourism by the University of Connecticut, southeastern Connecticut is responsible for 34 percent of the nearly $10 billion tourists spent in the state. Tourism now employs more people in Connecticut than manufacturing, making the area a hub of economic activity for the state.
Although the casino’s revenues are tax-exempt – the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which owns Foxwoods, achieved federal recognition and the casino sits on tribal lands – the tribe pays 25 percent of the take from the slot machines to the state as part of a compromise that led to Foxwoods’ creation. The state then distributes the money – $369 million in 2002 – to its 169 towns as it sees fit.
Local municipalities say the gains have come with major drawbacks. Community leaders complain they don’t get enough casino revenue to make up for the mounting traffic, crime and daily inconvenience that stems from having a little piece of Las Vegas in their backyard.
“[The casinos] aren’t making millions of dollars a month because people are walking away happy,” said Mullane, the North Stonington selectman.
He said the increased traffic along Route 2 has not resulted in more business for the town because the casino has its own shops and restaurants.
“We have refurbished two gas stations and added a couple donut shops, and that’s it,” Mullane said.
An otherwise soft-spoken man of 65, Mullane crusades against casinos. Once described by The New York Times as “the last angry man” (a description he bristles at), he has repeatedly testified before Congress about the flaws of federal recognition laws for Indian tribes, calling them a front for corporations.
Mullane points to the casino impact statement his town council created, which blamed the casinos for a decrease in commercial property on Route 2, the discovery of two brothels, the opening of a pornography shop and the need for additional state troopers to patrol the 55-square-mile town.
Crime has increased exponentially since the casino opened, he said, citing auto theft and embezzlement as problems but calling drunken driving the biggest issue.
But Sergeant J. Paul Vance, a spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, denied that Foxwoods causes an unreasonable amount of crime.
“There certainly is no ongoing crime wave,” he said. “It’s a busy little town, and it certainly gives us more work, but you could build a basketball stadium and see similar amounts of crime.”
Costs associated with maintaining the roads around the casino have also affected neighboring Ledyard. Its mayor, Susan Mendenhall, said the towns do not receive enough money to compensate for costs associated with the casino.
According to Ledyard’s 2001 impact statement, the town spent $2.2 million per year on public safety, public works, crime enforcement and social services because of the casino.
Mendenhall said the $500,000 Ledyard gets annually from the state’s “Pequot fund” is not equitable.
“I believe the state should give Ledyard about $1.5 million for casino impact and then adjust it for cost of living,” she said. “We have incorporated a great deal of expense within our budgets every year [from casino impact].”
Bruce MacDonald, Foxwoods’ manager of media relations, said the Mashantucket Pequot tribe had nothing to do with how the state allocates funds.
He said he understands Mullane and Mendenhall’s concerns, conceding that the communities have significantly changed since Foxwoods opened. He emphasized, however, that Foxwoods has had a positive overall economic impact on the region.
“If you want to see the result of [Foxwoods’] economic impact, then just drive down Route 2, and you’ll see more businesses there than before the casino went up,” he said.
According to MacDonald, the tribe is the single largest property taxpayer in Ledyard, owning several properties off the reservation and working to develop two championship golf courses in Ledyard that would add unspecified tax revenue to the town’s coffers.
With more than 13,500 employees in the area, he said the casino is the second largest employer in the state and provides “competitive salary and full benefits.”
The average salary of a Foxwoods employee is $25,000 per year.
MacDonald pointed to a 2000 University of Connecticut study that credited the tribal nations for collectively creating 41,363 jobs in southeastern Connecticut and increasing the gross state product by about $1.2 billion per year.
Those jobs helped southeastern Connecticut recover from defense-manufacturing cutbacks in the 1990s, said Mayor Howard Beetham of Montville, another local community.
“I’d say this area of the state was on the verge of becoming the next Appalachia, only worse, if it weren’t for the casinos,” Beetham told The Patriot Ledger in 2002.
But Mullane questions whether those gains are worth casinos’ negative effects. His collection of newspaper articles about crimes near the casinos now amounts to two huge bundles.
One such clipping told of Andrea Robinson, a Massachusetts mother who held up the Brookline Credit Union after dropping her child off at school. After her arrest, Robinson admitted to robbing three other establishments to offset her losses of $2,000 to $3,000 per week at Foxwoods blackjack tables.
“The government legalized a vice,” said Mullane. “If you had a drug which killed 1 to 2 percent of the people who took it, you wouldn’t put it on the market, but that’s just what gambling does.”
The Massachusetts legislature is expected to continue considering various gambling measures when it reconvenes at the end of the month.