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For San Pablo city officials, it isn’t a casino so much as an economic godsend, a chance to save an impoverished city that will die without it. 

“Even with the casino as is”—a cardroom—“if [the expansion] doesn’t proceed, the City of San Pablo will fold,” said a passionate City Manager Brock Arner  

For critics, though, it’s an economic parasite, feeding off the poor and the elderly, sucking blood out of the community and threatening to create traffic and public health nightmares. 

“A casino is a false economy. It undermines the economic basis of small business... It destroys lives,” said Rev. Chuck Day, senior pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church of San Pablo. 

If city and tribal officials have their way, with the blessing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cardroom that is Casino San Pablo will become a 2,500-slot-machine urban gambling mecca—California’s first—siphoning off millions for the state and local government and reviving a city on the brink. 

But the opposition is fervent and substantial, including state legislators, a U.S. senator and other gamblers, including the owners of the card rooms that are the only form of non-tribal gambling—besides the lottery—currently allowed in California. 

The conflicting currents all came together Saturday in a five-hour forum that packed a San Pablo auditorium and spilled out into the lobby. 

Led by East Bay Democratic Assemblymember Loni Hancock, whose district includes San Pablo, the meeting was organized into a series of panels heavily weighted with critics of the proposed casino. 

The staunchest defenders of the governor’s plan to create the first urban gambling palace along the California coast were Margie Mejia, chair of the Lytton Band of Pomos who own the casino in its current incarnation as a card room, elected and appointed San Pablo city officials and UNITE-HERE!, the hotel workers’ union. 

The promise of economic revitalization and jobs drives the city’s interest, and it’s the jobs themselves that fuel the union’s ardent advocacy. 

Other concerns about the proposal included a poignant plea by a woman whose life was saved by a fast ambulance ride to Doctors Hospital—situated adjacent to the casino and the only public emergency room within a 25-mile radius—who worried that heavy casino traffic congestion could cost lives, a concern shared by hospital officials. 

Contra Costa County Health Services Director William Walker said that assessing the casino’s public health impacts is difficult, primarily because there are no other urban casinos in California to compare it to. 

But he said other cities with casinos reported higher incidence of suicide, sexually transmitted diseases, alcoholism, drug deaths and arrests. He also noted that casino gambling is more addictive than other forms of wagering and results in increases in domestic violence. 

Walker said he also worried that increased traffic to the site on San Pablo Avenue could adversely impact access to Doctors Hospital. 

San Pablo Mayor Joe Gomes said he was very concerned when city voters originally passed a measure to allow the card room in 1994. “But we had been badly impacted financially, and in due time we would have had to disincorporate—and that would have been a disaster,” he said. 

“Since then, the club has enabled the city to stay solvent, improve our infrastructure and provide recreational facilities we didn’t have previously.” 

City Manager Arner put the city’s plight in starker terms: “Ninety percent of San Pablo residents have to commute outside the city to work. Eighteen percent of residents live below the poverty level, which is 330 percent above the county average, and unemployment is 170 percent higher than the county.” 

Tribal Chair Margie Mejia promised that her tribe “will provide good jobs with good benefits. We will create a thousand additional union jobs, and there will be thousands of union construction jobs.” 

The 25 percent of net gambling winnings the tribe has promised to pay the state—a figure she estimated at $155 million annually—“is higher than for any tribal government anywhere,” she said. 

“We will also pay for traffic mitigations and city services, and for improvements to local roads and the (San Pablo Avenue) freeway interchange.” 

Mejia hailed the casino as a “long-awaited opportunity to lift our tribe out of poverty. Many of us now live in desperate conditions as a result of generations of poverty going back at least 100 years.” 

However, the state’s percentage from the site could drop if other casinos open without the 35-mile-radius exclusive franchise proposed by the governor. Plans for two nearby casinos are now in the regulatory pipeline—a Las Vegas-style hotel resort at Point Molate and another casino-only planned for North Richmond.  

Similar arguments to those raised by Mejia and San Pablo officials were raised in Richmond when that city’s council agreed to sell Point Molate to Berkeley developer James D. Levine. 

But William Thompson, a professor at the University of Nevada—Las Vegas and one of the country’s leading gambling experts, said the proposed casino would inevitably draw its clientele from the people Arner said it would benefit. 

Thompson compared the likely habitués of the expanded Casino San Pablo to those who haunt the slot machines in Las Vegas grocery stores. 

“Neighborhood casinos are bad for communities,” he said, citing the 1999 findings of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. He said half the players would be Alameda and Contra Costa County residents, and only 10 percent would come from outside the Bay area. 

The casino would pose no threat to Las Vegas, he said, and Nevada would reap substantial profits, including millions from slot machine sales, since all slots are manufactured in that state. 

Thompson’s contention received reinforcement this week when the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry published a study showing that elderly gamblers on fixed incomes are at high risk for becoming problem gamblers.  

Legislative View 

Hancock, an opponent of casinos in her East Bay district, began the meeting by noting that the state constitution doesn’t require local input when tribes negotiate casino compacts with the state. 

Though San Pablo voters approved the 1994 initiative authorizing the present card room, the current proposal requires no such action. That agreement was hammered out by representatives of the tribe and Schwarzenegger’s office, but has stalled in the state Legislature. 

“The California Constitution does not require that members of the community should be involved when a compact is negotiated between a tribe and the state,” Hancock said. “There is nothing requiring that the City Council be involved.” 

“There is the promise of a great many millions coming to the community, but there is no provision in the compact guaranteeing money to local communities,” she said. 

Assemblymember Joe Cianciamilla, a Pittsburg Democrat whose district borders on Hancock’s, said the broader question is whether gambling is good for California. “Is this the way we want to fund local services? Is this the legacy we want to leave for future generations?” 

Cianciamilla called Casino San Pablo “a bellwether for casinos in San Francisco and San Diego.” 

Joe Nation, an Assembly Democrat who represents southern Marin County, said “It seems to me that we’re losing control of the process.” 

While not an outright foe of gambling, Nation said he opposes authorization of urban casinos like the Lytton proposal. “Once you cross that line, instead of the 54 casinos we have now there could be 109 casinos in California.” 

San Pablo Councilmember Leonard McNeil blamed the need for casinos on Proposition 13. 

While he said he doesn’t believe that the states can “gamble their way out of fiscal crisis. . .you cannot put the genie back in the bottle.” 

While McNeil claimed that tribal gambling “is the most regulated in the country,” regulators in Nevada and New Jersey typically deride the loose oversight of tribal gaming, and a recent study by the San Diego Union-Tribune demonstrated that tribal records go largely unaudited. 

“Contra Costa County is becoming ground zero for urban gambling in California,” said Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia, who said he was especially concerned about the cumulative impacts and the ambiguity of compacts. 

Dave Brown, a member of the West Contra Costa County School District board, said he was especially concerned about the messages casinos send to young people whom the schools are trying to teach character and moral values. 

“The major regional impacts are out of scale with the surrounding communities,” said El Cerrito Mayor Sandi Potter. 

Oakland City Councilmember Jean Quan, a vocal casino foe, recently voted with her colleagues against plans for a tribal casino at the Oakland airport. 

“Gambling redistributes wealth from the have-nots to the haves,” said recently elected Richmond Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin. “It creates no new products and low-income people suffer the most from gambling problems.” 

Cathy Ornellos, representing San Leandro Mayor Sheila Young, noted that her city council had voted in unanimous opposition to the Oakland Casino, and Frank Egger, Fairfax councilmember, read from his proposed statewide ballot initiative calling for a moratorium on new tribal casinos and enhanced regulatory structure. 

Audience members seemed to be weighted against the casino, judging by the applause speakers received.