I’m betting that a closer look at opening a full-fledged casino at Aurora’s Arapahoe Park Race Track might not be such a bad idea.
I’m ducking. Go ahead, throw what you will. I felt the same way when I heard that the company that owns Arapahoe Park, Mile High Racing, had amassed about $1.2 million to get an expanded gambling question in front of Colorado voters this fall. What they want is to change state law that limits gambling to the towns of Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek so that live-horse-racing tracks could also offer slots, roulette and card games.
And guess how many live-horse racing tracks there are in Colorado? Just one. Just in Aurora.
Of course, there’s sort of the rub. It’s not exactly in Aurora. It’s exactly just over the border near East Quincy Avenue and E-470 in unincorporated Arapahoe County.
I’ll show my hand. There are lots of folks who say Mile High is only dreaming about opening up slots or anything else at Arapahoe Park. That’s because the owners of casinos in Colorado mountain towns are also collecting big money they will unflinchingly use to persuade voters that expanding gambling anywhere in the state will destroy the earth, or their monopoly, or something like that. They aren’t about to risk Colorado’s $760 million-a-year gambling gold mine. This isn’t the first time interlopers have hoped to get a piece of the action, and a flood of attack ads have kept the problem at bay since the first slot was played in 1992.
The gambling business makes me uneasy. I don’t have anything against gambling. I think it’s fun. But I have no illusions about it being anything other than an entertaining way to lose money. I make an annual trek to Central City each year for an opera, twice if “Carmen” is on. I don’t gamble. I prefer to spend my money on food, wine, skiing and other vices. It saddens me to see rows and rows of old women in faded pantsuits working the slots like they were mundane, unrewarding factory jobs. If it’s rent or prescription money they’re losing, it’s all the sadder. But much of that is urban legend. Sure, the casinos live off of the cash-blood of the modest and the poor, but I’m not about to judge people for what brings them pleasure. And if sitting in a nice place and tipping back a couple while you push slot-machine buttons is more fun than paying a hundred bucks for tiny pieces of raw fish and drinking fermented grapes, have a great time.
The should-or-shoudn’t-gambling argument is over. The casinos and the adrenaline won.
Doubling down: Owners ponder casino plan for Aurora’s Arapahoe Park race track
So what if a real-live casino were to open in southeast Aurora, breathing new life into the struggling race track? Aurora could do right what current casino towns have done wrong. Central City and Black Hawk, once decaying historical mining towns, were supposed to blossom into fun tourism meccas. Other than the occasional opera patron and stray Midwestern tourist, nobody goes to the casino towns except gamblers because there’s nothing else there.
Aurora has a pretty damned-cool reservoir out next to Arapahoe Park. It’d be pretty easy to attract big money to create a water-themed casino park. A sort of Atlantic City/Lake Okoboji place with a boardwalk and lots of live music venues and stuff in the lake to keep the kids out of your hair long enough to drop a couple hundred on the blackjack tables. I’d drive out there for that. I do not drive to Central City or Black Hawk for what they offer.
Sure, there are a lot of questions about such a notion, and the existing gambling industry is hoping I disappear in the Aurora Reservoir just for mentioning this. But it’s worth looking at before Ameristar and Co. start screaming about “gamble-ggedon” for allowing even one stinking slot machine outside of the mountains.
Aurora would have to annex the land to ensure control of the whole thing. It could be a horrible disaster.
But it could be a real jackpot for the city and the metro area. Hit me.
Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com
Enjoy your new cement shoes, Dave.