More fun with geography; Langford & The Man; Caesars’ rough week

What’s in a mile? A lot more than you might think, especially if you’re a Maine legislator. Confronted with a pesky requirement that gambling venues in the Pine Tree State must have 100-mile exclusivity zones, some would redefine a “mile” as 1.25 miles. That is to say, they’d circumvent state law by creatively reinterpreting “mile” ex post facto to mean “road mile.” So henceforth and for the purposes of job creation a mile is a mile … except when it isn’t.

Now we’re sorta old fashioned at S&G and visualize a straight line when the law says “100 miles.” Imagine trying to draw a radius whose contours were defined in road miles. It’d be a pretty funny-looking critter, I warrant you. Casino proponents Black Bear Entertainment have been hoist on their own petard here, I’m afraid. They cited the 100-mile figure in their own referendum question and now it’s come back to haunt them. Although BBE won far and square at the ballot box, rewriting state law — to say nothing of the laws of geography — when you get caught out by your own legal verbiage doesn’t pass the smell test.

Even if “the Oxford Hills region desperately needs the casino project to move forward,” that doesn’t rationalize doing something that reeks of unconstitutionality. S&G wishes success to Penn National Gaming and Scarborough Downs if they have to challenge this legislative afterbirth in court.

Blackout. That’s what Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford (D) accuses New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) of doing with his partial takeover of the Boardwalk. Christie, Langford contends, is effectively redrawing city lines to create an enclave for The Man. Also not mincing words is veteran gaming analyst Dennis Forst, who notes that “Atlantic City had 30 years to work this out, to make themselves indestructible, and they’ve wasted all of those years.” Too true. If one accepts Forst’s logic and leaves A.C. to its own devices, then it also stands to reason that the same goes for the horse tracks: no casino-funded subsidy, no “racinos,” you’re at the mercy of the marketplace. The horsey set would be rending its kelly-green cutaway coats and stomping on its top hats in dismay, but so be it.

Breaking even? That might finally be the case at Sands Bethlehem, which is getting pretty good-sized play at the tables ($66K per table) despite having 1/3 fewer than Parx Casino ($55K/table) and 10% fewer than Harrah’s Chester Downs ($56.5K/table). The only fly in the ointment for Sands is that continued expansion of the megaresort, per contractual requirement, will keep moving the break-even point up and up. Sands Bethlehem may somebody be taught in college classes as a textbook example of “chasing ROI.” Lumbering along with $5.5 million in gross table revenues, mammoth $800 million Rivers Casino isn’t pulling its weight.

Rough week for Caesars. In quarterly reports, casino companies announce financial disruptions due to spring flooding as though this were a recent and unexpected concept. (If they — or Wall Street analysts — are not building X number of days of flood-related closure into their financial projections, they ought to be.) In any event, this yearly inconvenience has been visited upon two riverboat casinos owned by Caesars Entertainment. Floodwaters on the Ohio River forced a lengthy (by casino standards) shutdown of Horseshoe Indiana (above). However, it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow somebody some good and in this case it was the Salvation Army, upon whom Horseshoe generously bestowed surplus food that is no doubt badly needed in these hard-hit times.

Those same high waters interdicted operation of Harrah’s Metropolis, downriver in Illinois. (Like an Illinois casino needs more problems these days.) Unlike Horseshoe, the Metropolis boat was still waiting for the river to recede as of this writing. Compounding these indignities, the Nevada Legislature backhanded a proposed law that would raise the Las Vegas Strip sales tax to 9% for the exclusive benefit of Caesars and its partners in a proposed stadium, out back of where “Project Linq” is to be erected.

Et tu, Ralston? Given the widespread miseria afflicting Nevada, gift-wrapping a tax increase for Gary Loveman & Co. was a non-starter in the Lege and probably won’t fare much better at the ballot box in 2012. (It’s one thing to raise room taxes: the electorate presumes somebody else will pay those.) Lawmakers left the door open to crafting an arena proposal of their very own, however. Jon Ralston had the best take on the outcome, Tweeting that if state seantors had any panache, they’d have plunged their daggers into Caesars’ proposal on the Ides of March.

The importance of education. It opens at lot of doors in the casino industry, at least if you live in Macao, where 3/4 of all casino jobs require a high school degree. But 59% of the city’s jobless population never even finished junior high. Stay in school, kids.