Anti-casino group claims 'landslide'

A GRASS-ROOTS effort to ask voters where the two city casinos should be built collected 13,319 ballots on Election Day, organizers said yesterday.

A vast majority of those who voted in Casino-Free Philadelphia's unofficial election opposed construction of casinos within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools and other public spaces.

The group said it had tallied 12,592 votes in favor of that notion, which had been listed as a question on the city's official ballot until being removed by the state Supreme Court at the request of the state Gaming Control Board.

"If this was on the ballot, it would have passed in a landslide," Casino-Free Philadelphia organizer Daniel Hunter told volunteers yesterday. "No doubt about it."

Casino-Free Philadelphia volunteers set up bright-red cardboard ballot boxes outside 43 polling places across the city last Tuesday. The group received 9,446 votes that way, another 3,030 votes on its Web site, and 843 votes cast by phone.

Casino-Free Philadelphia volunteers then spent five days checking the ballots against the city's rolls of registered voters.

Councilman Frank DiCicco, who introduced the legislation to get the casino question on the ballot, urged the group to turn its attention to the state General Assembly.

Many members of the city's delegation to Harrisburg voted for the 2004 law that legalized slot-machine parlors in 14 locations across the state, including two in Philadelphia. DiCicco pointed out that those legislators are up for re-election next year.

Hunter said Casino-Free Philadelphia now will launch a letter-writing campaign asking those legislators to approve a 1,500-foot buffer zone between casinos and public spaces.

Two Delaware riverfront casinos approved by the Gaming Control Board, SugarHouse in Fishtown and Foxwoods in South Philly, are planned to be built within 1,500 feet of homes.

SugarHouse spokesman Dan Fee yesterday noted that Casino-Free Philadelphia had collected votes from less than 1 percent of the city's population, that ballot boxes had been placed outside fewer than 3 percent of the city's polling places, and that none of the people who ran for local office on anti-casino platforms had been elected.

"This isn't a mandate," Fee said. "It's an embarrassment."

Foxwoods spokeswoman Maureen Garrity called the vote "statistically insignificant."

"We've always said that only a vocal minority oppose these casinos," Garrity said. "This vote dispels the myth that Philadelphians are opposed to casinos." *