A firm hired by a local Indian tribe released a study last week forecasting 9,000 new permanent jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue if a casino is built, but one top official cautioned against moving too quickly to bring casino gambling to Massachusetts.
The study, commissioned by the Wampanoag Tribe of Martha's Vineyard, presented a rosy picture of the economic impact of a casino and resort modeled on Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun, the two extremely successful Indian-owned casinos in Connecticut.
The study, done by Deloitte & Touche, a leading accounting and consulting firm, predicts a casino and resort in southeastern Massachusetts would instantly perform on the same level as Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun each do now -- grossing slightly more than US$1 billion a year.
The study is also predicated on the expectation that $840 million in spending at a new facility in Massachusetts would come from people who will stay in the state to gamble.
If the forecast is accurate, the Massachusetts casino and resort would return some US$250 million in tax revenues to the state, based on an earlier pledge by the tribe to provide a 25 percent cut of income to the Commonwealth.
State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, however, said state officials should be careful not to invite a casino into the state at the risk of taking business away from the state Lottery, which currently returns US$864 million in annual tax revenue. She said her hunch is that a casino would draw customers away from Keno, which is played in social settings such as taverns and neighborhood retail outlets. Keno sales are currently US$594 million, she said.
But Scott Fraser, a principal at Deloitte & Touche, said his analysis of 15 states where casinos were introduced against the backdrop of existing lotteries showed that about half the casinos did not siphon money from state lotteries. In those 15 states, 27 casinos opened over the period examined by Fraser.
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