Sands Bethlehem could soon pocket another $10 million a year but it’s letting Mount Airy Casino do the heavy lifting. The latter is arguing to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that the flat, yearly fee falls disproportionately on small casinos, not the big boys 
like Sands, or as the state constitution puts it, “all taxes shall be uniform, upon the same class of subjects.” On the other side of the issue are elected officials like Bethlehem Mayor Robert Donchez, who says $10 million a year translates into 100 police officers and the “host fee is significantly important to our budget.” Added state Sen. Pat Browne, anticipating a court defeat, “I don’t know exactly how we’d go about it, but given that this fee has been established for a decade, we’re not just going to let this money be stripped from municipalities that rely on it.” However, given the Legislature’s hopeless performance on gaming-related issues last session, is it going to be able to get its act together and find a way to prop up civic budgets?
Mount Airy has a case: SugarHouse in Philadelphia is exempted from the levy (it pays a simple 4% of gross receipts), as are the state’s two resort casinos. Also, as a percentage of slot revenue the tax falls more heavily on Mount Airy (7%) than on, say, Parx Casino (3%). Mount Airy wants an across-the-board, 2% impost, which would also end “true-up” payments that casinos have to make at end of each year to reach the $10 million threshold. (The biggest “true-up” casualty: little Presque Isle Downs racino, which has paid $62 million over its lifetime.) Sands says it doesn’t need the tax relief. “We knew exactly what we were getting into when we applied for the license,” said casino CEO Mark Juliano. “We’re not trying to get out of it. We don’t intend to join in the suit.” That’s a surprisingly generous (and civic-spirited) frame of mind.
* Juliano’s boss, Sheldon Adelson, has been making some non-gaming headlines. He’s been spending some of his wealth on efforts to rehabilitate Israel‘s image among American millennials, who are increasingly siding with Palestine. Says Adelson lieutenant David Brog, which perhaps just a touch of alarmism, “It’s the No. 1 
nonmilitary threat to Israel and the Jewish people. Our goal is to change the younger generation from neutral, if not opposed to, Israel to support of Israel.” Most of the activities are benign, whether it’s hosting “peace tents” (complete with free falafel) at anti-Israel rallies or sending students to the Holy Land to study the issue up close. “The facts on the ground are very different from apartheid and genocide,” said Rabbi Aaron Lerner, adding that he hopes to change the conversation “to one about complexity, nuance and dialogue, which is better suited to a university.”
Unfortunately — and this is what landed Adelson in the newspapers — the David Horowitz Freedom Center went off the reservation and back into the Joe McCarthy tactics of the 1950s. Pro-Palestinian UCLA student Robert Gardner was surprised to see himself named as one of 16 “Jew haters” on a poster in Westwood. Subsequently, “I’ve received death threats online, and people have followed me.” UCLA pushed back, accusing the Horowitz Center of “guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear.” On the whole, Adelson’s intentions appear to be laudatory but he’d do well to rein in the Horowitz Center attack dogs, lest they overshadow his good works.
* There’s been a dramatic reversal in California‘s online-poker debate but it doesn’t bring the issue any closer to resolution. Assemblyman Adam Gray caved to longstanding 
pressure and explicitly consigned PokerStars to the penalty box for five years. (He also simplified a complex, sliding-scale taxation formula to a flat, 10% rate.) As columnist Steve Ruddock puts it “the amended version of AB 2863 doesn’t really add support, it simply flip flops which groups support the bill.” Now the tribes which allied themselves with PokerStars not find themselves outside, looking in, they’ll probably be only too glad to see AB 2863 fail. Indeed, several tribes and card rooms were quick to issue a declaration that “As now drafted, the bill arbitrarily and unfairly bars one operator from competing with the supporters of these amendments in the iPoker indefinitely.”
PokerStars spokesman Eric Hollreiser blasted the Gray amendment as “poison pill language,” the product of “backroom deals” that “applies penalties for alleged crimes without any application of due process.” The Poker Players Alliance offered its own legal opinion, namely that a purported five-year ban “is actually a lifetime ban,” raising serious constitutional issues. Gray, it appears, has stood the Internet poker debate on its head without producing any momentum.
* Move over, Las Vegas. According to Muscogee Nation Casinos CEO Pat Crofts, the tribe’s new, Margaritaville-branded casino is practically the best thing since sliced bread. “Tulsa doesn’t know what’s about to hit it. I mean, this is going to be big. Really big … It’s a game-changer. For the tribe, for the city, for the whole Tulsa area, ” Crofts said of the casino’s soft opening. The dramatic, 27-story hotel tower won’t be ready for occupancy until next year but the new, 50,000-square-foot Margaritaville casino (doubling down on the adjoining River Spirit Casino) is two days away from opening. It was constructed with a sense of humor: Amenities include “a volcano [that] erupts lava into a giant blender while a seaplane swoops low over the dining room.” As you can see, tribal casinos are continuing to rival Vegas at its own game.
The new casino and hotel are expected to be catalysts for development in the surrounding area, which gives tribal Chief James Floyd mixed feelings. “We will have to find a balance. This is our land, and we’ve got to preserve it for future generations,” he said. “I like looking out the windows here and seeing an eagle’s nest beside the river or a blue heron in the water. I don’t want to lose that.”
* Wynn Resorts is narrowing the window of completion for Wynn Boston Harbor. June 2019 is now the projected finishing line. Let’s see if we can all keep our shirts on until 
then. Thankfully, obstructionist Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone is giving up on further attempts to waylay the megaresort. In an ass-covering statement, Curtatone said, “I want to be clear, our appeal was never about stopping the casino but rather about our civic duty to protect the health, safety, and quality of life of our residents. While we did not get everything we asked for, the appeal did yield significant and meaningful results for our residents, so we feel the process worked … With some of our key concerns now reasonably addressed, we do not see the need to further pursue in court the issues raised by our other legal actions, which will be withdrawn.”
