Biloxi mayor says gambling provides new trucks and new jobs to all Tunica residents . . . Really?
Rob ChambersBiloxi mayor gives gambling a positive spin in recent article, Presidential politics likely to impact gambling landscape:
A.J. Holloway, the four-term mayor of the city of Biloxi, said he doesn’t know the politics of Alabama, but Mississippi had to do something. He’s talking about casinos. “We were the poor state,” he said last week after one of the conferences of the Southern Gaming Summit held at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum & Convention Center. “This has been a big boom for Mississippi.” He cites Tunica in the Mississippi Delta as proof. “That was the Sugar Ditch of the United States before casinos came in, and they have a new pickup truck at every house now…The casinos came and everybody in and around Tunica got a job.”
I, however, find this perplexing, near mathematically improbable, and even contradictory to the facts. How can it be that everyone in Tunica has a new truck and has a job when Tunica unemployment rates have been hovering around 12 percent the last few months? His claims are simply not true, but why would Mayor Holloway say such a thing?
He’s trying to give a “reasonable” explanation to justify the historic introduction of casino gambling into an economically depressed Tunica and how he believes it has made Tunica a better community. I gather that he presupposes that casino gambling creates a positive environment by creating more jobs and more state-based assistance that will result in a “better” community. This begs the question, does evidence show that the infusion of money has indeed made Tunica a better community? I say no.
With little variance in population for Tunica County over the last 18 years, the number of violent crimes reported in Tunica County went from 4 violent crimes in 1980 (12 years before casino gambling) to an average of 83 per year or an increase of 2,075 percent each year from 2001 – 2005.
In 1980, when unemployment averaged 11.7 percent, there were 6 property crimes reported. From 2001-2005, when unemployment averaged 8.8 percent, there was an average of 619 non-violent crimes reported per year for an annual average increase of over 10,000 percent. [First quarter 2008 unemployment rate for Tunica average is over 11 percent.]
Mayor Holloway’s statements and arguments are misleading at best. Even if it were true that people in Tunica have more jobs and money, it does not follow that casino gambling has made Tunica a better community. The statistics above on the increase of crime speak for themselves regardless of what pro-gambling politicians say.