Casinos threaten small community theater and entertainment venues
Casinos promise riches, but create more losers than winners on the gaming floor. The industry wouldn’t work the other way around.
As the Georgia General Assembly debates the merits of allowing resort casinos, proponents promise this bet will pay off and attract more tourism, investments in new infrastructure, job creation and a windfall for the state treasury. In other words, it’d create more winners than losers for the state as a whole.
Those are strong arguments, and all of those claims may prove true. But before we move forward, let’s also consider an unintended consequence.
The Georgia Arts and Culture Venues Coalition, which represents members across the state, wants legislators to understand fully how casinos with large entertainment theaters could seriously damage existing, family friendly destinations that contribute significantly to the quality of life in our state.
In Forsyth, we boast two excellent venues — our Fine Arts Center and the historic Rose Theater, which provides a draw to our downtown. Our small city doesn’t attract the big names that come to large metro areas, but the Fine Arts Center, with 1,300 seats, brings in well-known professional entertainers who once played bigger markets and also up-and-coming acts who might make it big. Now restored, the Rose Theater, with 160 seats, provides nationally known stage plays performed by local members of the community, providing a Broadway experience just down the street from home.
Residents of Monroe County can easily get to Macon or Atlanta or Columbus for larger shows, but their patronage of local shows allows us to maintain these assets, to support taxpayer-owned facilities, to preserve a historic building and to keep dollars spent on entertainment in our county.
The bigger markets certainly provide competition, but our local offerings have still thrived, and we’re a richer community for it.
A casino with an entertainment venue that can seat thousands, however, is no ordinary competitor. Rather than facing off on a level playing field, casinos are able to box out existing venues by paying far above market rates for top acts. They use these events as loss leaders to bring in customers — and then make their profits on gambling. Adding to the problem, casinos can demand exclusivity agreements in return for their big payouts, preventing acts from performing shows within a certain radius of the casino.
We don’t have to speculate on how casinos change a market; we can look at other regions across the country where casinos are located. Surveys of performing arts venues in those areas report that 70 percent say they lost concert acts to casinos, theaters in smaller markets were forced out of certain entertainment segments while those in larger markets saw a steady erosion of business, and many say they lost significant revenues and reduced their workforce.
If local venues were hurt or shut down because of casino theaters, we wouldn’t just be trading one set of seats for another. We would lose special and unique community assets that are part of our history and our cultural fabric, that enrich, educate and entertain us and that, unlike a casino, are appropriate for the whole family.
The Georgia Arts and Culture Venues Coalition isn’t taking a stand for or against the casino legislation, but it does want to make sure that we have safeguards in place so that we don’t lose way more than we were willing to gamble. Please reach out to our legislators and ask them to stand up for our community theaters.
Dennis Smith is a volunteer for the Backlot Players, who perform at the Rose Theater in Forsyth.