The Missouri Gaming Commission has released its report for Fiscal Year 2023-2024. Your careful observer will be spending a few days updating his statistical tables while at the same time researching material for a speech at the Missouri River Regional Library on October 8th that will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the document that created this nation (no, it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence but I will be referring to two words in the Declaration as well as some words spoken in Washington four score and seven years later).
But when we return to the topic, we will show you why Amendment 2 not only represents a mugging of our public education system, but how it also deepens the decades of the casino industry’s mugging of our veterans nursing home program and their own host cities.
***We have corrected a paragraph in our previous post on Amendment 2 in which we addressed Highway Patrol security at casinos and said the casinos do not reimburse the gaming commission for those expenses. We have corrected that paragraph to read:
The Highway Patrol provides security officers at our casinos. In the original version of this post, we reported the casinos do not reimburse the state for the costs of that security. We were incorrect. The annual report for FY2023-24, which became available to us after the original publication of this review, shows the casinos reimbursed the gaming commission $15.4 million for enforcement, a category that not only includes watching out for unlawful activity on the gaming floor but also includes investigations of those seeking various licenses connected to casino gambling.
We will continue to review our posts on this subject. It is not our intent to mislead our readers as we cast a critical eye at the claims of the industry and its allied professional sports teams.
Feel free to circulate these observations to friends, education groups, local newspapers, veterans groups, and your state legislators and/or candidates. And don’t be afraid to react in the box at the end of our entries. We enjoy hearing from our participants in these public dialogues.
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