Regulators on Wednesday awarded sports betting licenses to SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia, Harrah's Philadelphia Casino in Chester and Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. (AP/KDKA) - Pennsylvania is approving sports betting at three more casinos as it gets closer to becoming the sixth state with sports betting.

“Our job is to write the check and it’s their job to spend it.”Ī current Rivers spokesperson declined to comment for this story.HARRISBURG, Pa. “It’s the people who live in the neighborhood who get to decide what’s important to us, what are our priorities, how do we want to disperse this money throughout the community,” Wendy Hamilton, formerly SugarHouse’s general manager, told WHYY in 2010. Rivers pays for the Penn Treaty Special Services District, granting the org $1 million every year to pay for local projects. In the rest of Pennsylvania, it helps reduce property taxes.Ĭasinos also funnel cash into their immediate neighborhoods. In Philly, casino money offsets the wage tax. More than half of that gets pumped into the public good. In September 2019, then-SugarHouse made more than $13 million on its slot machines alone. Per state law, it gives back a whopping 54% of its slot machine revenue and 16% of its table game revenue to local government - one of the highest rates in the country. “Today, we’re launching our campaign to reclaim the riverfront, which is a campaign that will culminate in the bankruptcy of SugarHouse,” Zachary Hershman, a member of the group Casino-Free Philadelphia, told the Inquirer in 2010.īut the betting house does have benefits for the community. They worried about the spread of gambling addiction. They complained it wasn’t the best use of waterfront space. In the years leading up to the SugarHouse launch, Philadelphians voiced plenty of complaints. “What casinos have been and have meant has radically changed over the years.” “This is a reasonably tough issue,” Victor Matheson, an economist who studies gambling at the College of the Holy Cross, told Billy Penn. But the Fishtown wager house also gives back to the community.

On one hand, casinos often have disproportionate negative effects on people with low incomes, who make up a high percentage of the Philly population. But a decade into the experiment, how has gambling treated the city?Įxperts say understanding the impact is complicated. So things are going well for casino operators in Philadelphia.

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