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July 14, 2014 12:22 PM UTC

Funding Schools With Expanded Gaming?

  • 10 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post's Yesenia Robles reports:

Organizers for an education group collecting signatures to place a question on the ballot asking to expand gaming at the Arapahoe Park horse racetrack say they have collected enough signatures.

According to a news release from the group, Coloradans for Better Schools, the group collected and submitted 136,342 signatures in support of the ballot measure…

That's a healthy pad of signatures over the required 86,000 to get this measure on the November ballot, so it's likely to make it. In addition to allowing casino games at Arapahoe Park, the measure would also expand gaming at racetracks in Pueblo and Mesa Counties. The measure is supported mostly by the owners of the Arapahoe Park track, and opposed by most of the rest of the gaming industry in Colorado due to the competitive pressure it would place on existing gaming towns.

Proponents forecast a return of as much as $100 million per year to K-12 education, though opponents dismiss that amount as unrealistic.

What say you, Polsters? Ordinarily we'd say a one-off gaming measure like this, based on experience, doesn't have much chance of succeeding. The existing gaming towns vigorously defend their monopoly, and spend lavishly to defeat any attempt to expand gaming beyond them. The only thing that raises a question in our minds is the experience of last year's elections, where a tax increase to fund education failed dismally, but taxes on retail marijuana passed overwhelmingly.

So maybe sin is the new model for raising revenue in this state? A poll follows.


Would you expand gaming at Arapahoe Park to fund education?

Comments

10 thoughts on “Funding Schools With Expanded Gaming?

        1. I dunno. I hear they're starving the university up north. A friend of mine recently left a tenured position to take one is Australia. Apparently, there's quite an exodus of faculty going on.

  1. What I think is interesting is that the press is so lazy that they call this an "education group." Who is funding this?  – Not education advocates. 

    This inititiative is supported and funded by gaming advocates. They are using education as an issue to support a ballot measure that is really about expanded gaming rights more than education funding. 

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