From the Evansville Courier & Press:
In an attempt to keep Indiana riverboat casinos competitive with casinos in neighboring states, the Indiana state Senate recently passed a bill that would essentially cut in half city and county governments’ slice of taxes generated by riverboats.
The city of Evansville and Vanderburgh County stand to see up to $1 million cut from each of their general fund budgets by 2015 if the Indiana House approves Senate Bill 528 and it becomes law.
“The state is cutting back on something the residents of Vanderburgh County voted very strongly for,” Vanderburgh County Councilman
Mike Goebel said during a council meeting Wednesday afternoon. “I don’t think we should let this happen without putting up a very strong fight.”
Both the County Commission and the County Council have passed resolutions this week opposing the proposed legislation. The county may send a representative to speak to the House when it hears the bill next month.
The county uses riverboat tax money for infrastructure improvements, drainage projects and to fund its initiative-based assistance program, which helps people with day care costs and work training so they can become gainfully employed, said County Auditor Joe Gries. The city uses it for capital improvements, including new vehicles for the fire and police departments, said City Controller Russel Lloyd.
When Casino Aztar opened in 1996 “this body made a decision at that point in time that we weren’t going to use the riverboat money as operations money, and we haven’t,” said Councilman Jim Raben. “But it is going to have an affect on these programs. We’ll lose the initiative based program. That might never pick back up.”
But the bill’s author, Sen. Phil Boots, R-Crawfordsville, said the changes are needed if riverboats are going to remain in business at all.
“Overall, this is designed to help riverboats compete with surrounding communities,” Boots said. “Evansville is not facing that right now because Kentucky’s not doing it. But Ohio has built many casinos, and Illinois is doing it. Riverboats are being competitively disadvantaged at this point. This bill will give them some tools to compete.”
One of those tools is a change in the way riverboat casinos are taxed. Riverboats currently pay a $3 head tax for every person that enters the casino; The new law would instead tax casinos on the amount of money gambled, which is estimated to lower the casino’s annual taxes by an several hundred thousand dollars.
The bill will also allow the casinos to move operations onto land, give them other tax deductions, and authorize table gaming at so-called racinos, horse racing tracks that now limited to electronic gaming.
The part of Boots’s bill that will cost local governments the most is a proposal to eliminate a decade-old supplemental payment the state has made to riverboat municipalities since 2002.
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See the full article here:
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/feb/27/30pt-hed1-10-hed1-10-inches-p/
