Friday, September 17, 1999
Casinos lure Ky. patrons
Survey: Competition for tracks
The Cincinnati Enquirer
FRANKFORT — Work by researchers confirms what Kentucky horse track officials have long feared: Many customers visiting Indiana's fourOhio River casinos are from the Bluegrass State.
Caesars' Glory of Rome, one Indiana riverboat casino, attracts about 58 percent of its patrons from Kentucky, according to a survey financed by Churchill Downs.
The researchers, who checked license plates in the casino's lot in Harrison County, also concluded that the other Ohio River casinos — including Argosy in Lawrenceburg and Grand Victoria in Rising Sun — get a smaller, but still significant, percentage of their business from Kentucky.
The figures ranged from 20 percent Kentuckians at Casino Aztar in Evansville to 28 percent at Casino Argosy in Lawrenceburg.
Churchill officials said the survey, conducted by University of Louisville researchers, puts firm numbers behind the track's longstanding belief that the casinos are draining gambling money from Kentucky's tracks, such as Churchill Downs in Louisville and Turfway Park in Florence.
The Glory of Rome is just 15 miles downriver from Louisville. The Argosy boat in Lawrenceburg sits about 20 minutes from downtown Cincinnati; the Grand Victoria complex in Rising Sun is about 45 minutes from downtown.
The researchers could not be reached Thursday.
Churchill and other Kentucky thoroughbred race tracks want the General Assembly to legalize video slot machines at their facilities as a way for them to compete with casinos.
At Gov. Paul Patton's direction, the state has commissioned its own study of the social and economic impacts of expanding legal gambling. That study is due Dec. 1.
In late June, the leading proponent of video lottery terminals at racetracks jumped out of the fray. Sen. Tim Shaughnessy, a Louisville Democrat, said he was “setting my priorities straight” by announcing he would no longer lead the charge for any kind of gambling when the General Assembly convenes again in January.
The Downs' survey was conducted by Barry Kornstein and Paul Coomes of University of Louisville; the track paid them $5,000.
The survey recorded the origins of nearly 6,500 license plates on vehicles parked at the casinos and at their hotels on specific dates in June and July.
The survey did not address the question of how much money Kentuckians are spending at the four Indiana casinos.
But using the percentages of patrons and the casinos' revenue, the figures can provide a broad estimate of what kind of money gamblers are spending on the Ohio River boats, said Michael Przybylski, a researcher at Indiana University-Purdue University.
The Glory of Rome, for instance, made an average of $12.9 million per month from its patrons, according to reports filed with the Indiana Gaming Commission.
Of that amount, Kentuckians would have handed over an estimated $7.4 million each month, if their losses were in proportion to their numbers as counted by the Churchill survey.
The report's authors acknowledged they had to make a few assumptions. For instance, they noted that license plates for trucks in Kentucky and Indiana do not carry a county name.
For the purposes of the survey, they assumed the county-of-origin distribution was the same for trucks as it was for cars. Also, the researchers did not count tour buses.
Churchill Downs President Alex Waldrop said that if the percentages of Kentucky customers at each casino are applied to annual revenue collected by the four casinos, “somewhere between $250 million and $300 mil lion is walking across the river on a yearly basis.”
He said the total bet at Churchill Downs so far this year has declined 12 percent to 15 percent for simulcast races and 3 percent to 6 percent for live races, compared with last year.
“We'll have to get to the end of the year to make any final comparison, but we are seeing an impact,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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