Twelve years after Hurricane Katrina, Midwest and Bible Belt states still require casinos to be built on the water. Exceptions have been made for casinos on Mississippi‘s Gulf Coast and one 
of Mike Pence‘s latter acts as governor of Indiana was to sign an executive order allowing casinos to move ashore. (Only Tropicana Evansville has taken him up on it.) The dangers of requiring gambling houses to sit on barges was aptly demonstrated by Katrina, where the storm-tossed vessels became agents of destruction once torn from their moorings. For safety reasons alone, you’d think riverboat states would have woken up and smelled the coffee by now, but you’d be wrong. However …
…. there’s a glimmer of hope in Louisiana, where state Sen. Ronnie Johns — who represents the Lake Charles area — is pushing reform of laws that haven’t changed in 26 years. “Our laws are antiquated. They need to be updated if we want to keep up,” says Johns. Though he has no concrete legislation at this stage, he favors land-based casinos with the sop to opponents that there will be no expansion of gaming attached. Pelican State casinos are with Johns, plus they’d like to see the tax on free play lifted. They’d like legalized sports betting, too, pending Supreme Court approval.
Siting casinos on riverboats is a hypocritical palliative to the Religious Right. It enables them to take tax money from casinos while pretending they aren’t really “in” the state because they are 
on rivers or sit in water-filled moats. A couple of examples from the Baton Rouge area demonstrate this folly. L’Auberge Baton Rouge has a 45,000-square-foot atrium that mostly sits empty but could easily host gambling. And at Belle of Baton Rouge, “the casino hires divers to check and maintain the hulls. When the river rises, [Tropicana Entertainment] has to deploy workers to remove trees and other flotsam that jams the boat.” Slot managers would also jump at the opportunity to reconfigure their floors to accommodate newer, bigger machines.
The Louisiana Family Forum‘s Rev. Gene Mills has already promised opposition to any changes in the states gaming laws. If the churchy set is all hot under the collar, then Louisiana is probably moving in the right direction.
* Despite being smacked upside the head with a lopsided electoral vote against removing Atlantic City‘s monopoly on casinos, the two candidates for governor of New Jersey want to 
revisit the issue. Neither Wall Street executive Phil Murphy (D) nor Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno (R, seen with Gov. Chris Christie [R]) has let the will of the people penetrate their noggins. Murphy is in favor of lifting the monopoly outright rather than lose jobs and money to New York City. Guadagno fully agrees, save for the caveat that Atlantic City must be “stabilized” first. What does that mean? How can you stabilize the underpinnings of the Boardwalk if you planning to turn around and kick them out with an expansion to, say, the Meadowlands, We may never find out what Guadagno means, as all polls show Murphy cruising to an easy victory next month.
* Thanks to MGM Resorts International, the high roller suite that served as Stephen Paddock‘s sniper’s nest will be kept permanently out of circulation. In the meantime, MGM has been ordered to preserve anything of evidentiary value. The court decree “blocks Mandalay Bay from erasing video surveillance, card-swipe data and complaints coming from Paddock’s hotel suite until another hearing on October 30, where MGM Resorts will have a chance to argue against it.” Why would they?
