By Gary Thelen
Casinos in Iowa. What are the odds?
Iowans have always been big gamblers. After all, isn’t farming the ultimate roll of the dice?
Bingo has been popular for a long time, especially among Catholics. Churches often ran bingo games as a part of an annual bazaar or festival. Attorney General Richard Turner was defeated in the 1970s for closing down a church bingo game in northeast Iowa and causing the arrest of priests and nuns. The Iowa Legislature quickly legalized bingo for charitable purposes.
Iowans used to travel to the Aksarben horse track in Omaha. When that closed, there was a movement to have parimutuel betting in Iowa, which was legalized in 1983. Dog tracks were established at Council Bluffs and Dubuque, horse tracks at Waterloo and Altoona. None of them survived as stand-alone businesses.
Iowans, in their effort to be like Illinoisans, wanted a lottery as well. Many Iowans would pool their money and send a weekly runner to Illinois to purchase tickets. There was a great movement of money out of Iowa as a result.
Terry Branstad was elected Governor in 1982. Much of his support came from the right, who thought of gambling as sinful. Not only should the members of their religious sects abstain from gambling, so should everybody! Their beliefs should be our laws, they thought.
The Democratically-controlled Legislature passed a lottery bill, HF 634, during the 1983 session. Donald Avenson of Olwein was the Speaker of the House. Charles P. Miller of Burlington was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. Gov. Branstad vetoed the bill. Again in 1984, a lottery bill was passed. Again the Governor vetoed it. Many people in Iowa were incensed. Terry Branstad learned the hard way that you have to listen to the will of the people and not to the clergy of the Calvinists. During an appearance in Iowa City at the Iowa-Iowa State football game the next fall, he was booed by the crowd. In 1985, he signed the lottery bill. He had reelection on his mind.
Iowa now has more forms of gambling than the state of Nevada. There are 17 (soon to be 18) state-regulated casinos and two federally-supervised Native American establishments. (A third one closed last year.) Iowa’s casinos are big employers and pull much business from the residents of neighboring states. We are a gambling Mecca.
However, because of the recent poor economy, gambling revenues are down slightly. To make up for the loss, casinos are tightening up the payouts on their slot machines. State law requires each casino to post the average slot payout for the past three months at the cashier’s cage. The standard used to be 93.7 percent. Not anymore.
I logged about 700 miles in May traveling to various cemeteries in Iowa to decorate the graves of my ancestors. In the course of those travels, I stopped at every casino that I passed and looked at their posted slot payout. I visited ten state-regulated casinos. The Polk County-owned Prairie Meadows Casino had the most generous payout at 91.8 percent. Here are the others in descending order:
• Wild Rose Casino, Emmetsburg: 91.3 percent;
• Terrible’s Casino, Osceola: 91.2 percent;
• Riverside Casino, Washington County: 91.2 percent;
• Ameristar Casino, Council Bluffs: 90.7 percent;
• Diamond Jo Casino, Worth County: 90.6 percent;
• Argosy Casino, Sioux City: 90.2 percent;
• Harrah’s Council Bluffs: 90 percent;
• The Horseshoe Casino, Council Bluffs: 89.7 percent.
There is no doubt that gambling plays an important part in our economy. This is especially critical because our state has a stagnant population pegged at three million. Without gambling, Iowa would probably suffer from a population decline as residents would move elsewhere for employment. The state’s managers must now maintain an honest and clean industry without permitting greed to ruin the whole show.
Any bets? CV
Gary Thelen is a native Iowan, born and raised in Carroll. For 30 years he taught high school French and Spanish in the Des Moines Public Schools. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War Era. Since his retirement in 2001, he has worked as a clerk in the Iowa House, as a cruise ship speaker and as a political activist.
