Angry Philadelphia residents pushing City Council to approve an anti-casino ballot initiative got a sympathetic hearing yesterday from a member of the state legislature - the same body that gave them slots gambling.
Rep. Paul Clymer (R., Bucks), the leading anti-gambling advocate in the legislature, convened a meeting of the House Republican Policy Committee at City Hall to hear anti-casino activists tell him that slots parlors should not be built near their neighborhoods.
“The state of Pennsylvania is about to embark on an experiment never attempted before - putting a slots parlor in the middle of a historic residential neighborhood,” said Catherine M. Recker, who lives six blocks from the proposed SugarHouse Casino site on Delaware Avenue.
Recker and others, through a group called Casino Free Philadelphia, want Council to place a referendum question on the May 15 primary ballot asking voters to ban casinos within 1,500 feet of any home, school, or house of worship.
Those criteria would eliminate from casino use all but an untenable parcel around the Betsy Ross Bridge and an undesirable site at the Navy Yard, according to the City Planning Department.
Litigation would likely result, but such a change to the city’s Home Rule Charter could void the Dec. 20 state Gaming Control Board decision to license the SugarHouse and Foxwoods casinos at sites in Fishtown and South Philadelphia.
City Council is to vote on the measure Thursday. A supermajority of 12 out of 17 council members is necessary. The chief sponsor, Councilman Frank DiCicco, has said he has the support to pass it.
Yesterday, residents said that the casinos would cause their communities to be overrun with traffic and crime.
Representatives of SugarHouse and Foxwoods said they were not invited to the hearing.
“We wish that we had the opportunity to explain the strength of our project and the benefits to the greater Philadelphia community,” SugarHouse spokesman Dan Fee said.
Clymer said he wanted to give residents - who have complained that the Gaming Control Board had marginalized their input - their own time to address the legislature.
Only two legislators attended, Clymer and State Rep. Mike O’Brien (D., Phila.). Harrisburg approved 14 slots licenses in 2004. The first casinos in Philadelphia are expected to open next year.
On result of the hearing was that a meeting between warring Democratic fractions was scheduled for Thursday, after the Council vote.
O’Brien said he and State Rep. Bill Keller (D., Phila.), long at odds with DiCicco and his political mentor, State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, would meet with DiCicco and Fumo “to open honest, fact-to-face conversations on the most pressing issue to face the Delaware waterfront in a long time.”
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