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Cleveland Gets First Roll of Casino Dice in Ohio

Visitors to Ohio's first casino won't see glitzy Las Vegas-style stage shows but instead will get an invitation to gamble and then sample the attractions in blue-collar Cleveland.

The Horseshoe Casino Cleveland will open in late March on four floors of a renovated department store overlooking Public Square in the heart of downtown.

The casino will have 2,011 slot machines, 63 table games and a 30-table poker room.

Instead of offering in-house live entertainment, the casino will bet on drawing visitors who are also interested in other Cleveland attractions including its sports teams, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and its busy theater scene.

"Rather than saying, 'Come to Horseshoe Cleveland' and just come into the casino and stay the entire time, we're actually connecting to the city," the casino's manager, Marcus Glover, said during a year-end construction tour interview.

"We'll provide first-class amenities in terms of leveraging the amenities around us in the downtown corridor with the fine restaurants and hotels that are down here, as well as the venues and other attractions."

The city likes the idea of an estimated 5 million annual casino visitors strolling through downtown to shop, eat and sample the attractions.

"It's important for the casino not to be just an enclosed shrine to betting," said Chris Warren, Cleveland's chief of regional development.

With walkways and pedestrian tunnels linking the casino to the sports complex and Tower City retail-office complex, "you have a unique constellation of really high-visitor, high-marquee venues that will be connected," he said.

Plans for the initial casino phase call for a buffet restaurant and a food court with three outlets. The casino eventually will expand to include a newly built casino overlooking smokestack industries along the serpentine Cuyahoga River.

By comparison, Caesars Palace Las Vegas has 14 places to eat, plus shops, a spa and high-end entertainment including Celine Dion during the New Year's weekend.

The Cleveland casino and one planned for Cincinnati will be operated by a joint venture between Caesars Entertainment and Rock Gaming, run by Dan Gilbert, owner of the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers and founder of Quicken Loans.

The initial casino phase may have a familiar look for movie buffs. It will be in the old Higbee building, which played a starring role in the 1983 film "A Christmas Story." Planners have tried to preserve its retro look, right down to the original doors.

Two years ago, Ohio voters approved plans for four casinos, including locations in Columbus and Toledo to be run by Penn National Gaming.

Casino opponents, led by church groups, fought the vote and warned that gambling hits the pocketbooks of the poor the hardest. Cleveland, with a poverty rate of 34 percent, ranks as the nation's third-poorest big city.

Les Bernal, executive director of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation in Washington, D.C., predicts a litany of gambling-related problems will result in Ohio from casinos.

"Ohio is about to unleash one of the biggest public policy failures in America over the last 40 years," he said.

"It's going to increase the level of personal debt, it's going to create tens of thousands of new gambling addicts, it's going to develop an economy based on phony prosperity and it's going to ultimately result in higher taxes and worse budget deficits for the people of Ohio."

Brian Davis, a community organizer with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, said it's an open question whether any economic benefit from a casino would outweigh additional demands on social services because of gambling addicts, debt-ridden gamblers and other issues.

In either case, a casino will simply add an additional outlet to the betting opportunities already available, he said.

"People who are struggling with gambling addiction find ways even if they live in Cleveland right now," in the pre-casino era, he said.

A key selling point in the casino campaign was creating jobs. Cleveland's casino will have about 1,600 employees and initial job postings in recent weeks have drawn tens of thousands of applicants. The $350 million project is expected to create 2,000 construction jobs.

Cleveland's jobless rate was 9.1 percent in November, with nearly 17,000 people looking for work.

The casino also raised hopes of spinoff jobs, from initial construction work to expanded restaurant and tourism employment.

Source: Associated Press


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