Buffalo Niagara Partnership President and CEO Andrew Rudnick writes in a letter published by the Buffalo News that Delaware North Companies should run the Aqueduct horse track in Queens. Delaware North has a well-known interest in these kinds of operations.

The note stresses that the team (Aqueduct Gaming) involved in the deal are New York companies: Saratoga Gaming and Raceway, McKissack & McKissack (whose Web site says the company was founded in 1990 in Washington, DC before expanding into the Chicago market and now has offices in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta and Orlando), Shawmut (with offices in Boston, New York, Providence, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and New Haven), and Thalden Emery (with offices in Las Vegas, Phoenix, St. Louis, and Tulsa).

Finally, the letter states that the selection of Aqueduct Gaming would mean 100 new jobs in Buffalo. Says this is a “test of whether New York’s elected ‘leaders’ will support the state’s businesses.”

I put down the paper and called Andrew Rudnick to request a list of these local jobs. I was forwarded to the voice mail of Emily Alexandria Burns, Communications Manager for the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. I left a message on her office phone and her cell phone. I put in a follow-up call and was directed to Nadine Clancy, handling Business Intelligence at the Partnership. Nadine said she’d try to find someone who could answer my question.

It seemed like a simple question, seeing as the letter published today, but I guess not. I just put in another call, and was told that Emily was on a conference call and couldn’t talk to me. However, the receptionist sent her an email asking her to call me. She said Emily would be the one for me to talk to, since she’s the Communications Manager.

As soon as someone gets back to me with a list of the 100 new jobs that are hanging in the balance, I will publish it here.

Abandoning claims that a steady stream of red light runners will fund the hiring of 20 new police officers once surveillance cameras are installed at 50 city intersections, city officials now say that a windfall from the Seneca Casino will pay for the new hires.

The Buffalo News reports that $2.5 million—twice as much as was expected from Albany—will be coming to the city, based on receipts from the small blue building on sovereign Seneca territory in the cobblestone district.

One can only hope the new cops will be enough to cope with the increased crime that comes to places with casinos, as described in this May 2006 report in the Washington Post. Columnist Richard Morin writes, “Crime began to rise after the first year, slowly at first and then more quickly, until it had far surpassed what it would have been if the casino had never opened. By the fifth year of operation, robberies were up 136 percent; aggravated assaults, 91 percent; auto theft, 78 percent; burglary, 50 percent; larceny, 38 percent; and rape, 21 percent. Controlling for other factors, 8.6 percent of property crimes and 12.6 percent of violent crimes were attributed to casinos.”

Here is some interesting research by Earl L. Grinols, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, and University of Georgia Economist David B. Mustard, whose work is referred to in the Post column.

Some may see this as a wise use of an unpredicted windfall, but I say it’s time to parlay. Why quit when you’re on a roll with Albany? Just think of all the improvements that could come to the city if the mayor were to take the extra $1.25 million he wasn’t even counting on, and put it all into tickets for the Mega Millions! It only takes a dollar and a dream.

Bruce Jackson has posted the full text of the judge’s decision here.

And here’s what Bruce is reporting:

U.S. District Court Judge William M. Skretny has ordered the National Indian Gaming Commission to comply with National Indian Gaming Commission regulations in the case of the Senecas’ Buffalo casino, which means they are to shut it down. The government had argued that the judge had no right to tell the Department of the Interior and the National Indian Gaming Commission how to behave in this case and, moreover, they’d changed their rules recently, so he should just step aside and let them handle everything. The judge was having none of that foolishness. He denied their motions entirely and granted the plaintiffs’ request that the NIGC be told it had to do its job.

We’ll have an analysis of it online tomorrow and in Thursday’s print edition.

In this post over at BuffaloPundit, Alan Bedenko and Chris Smith suggest that the Wendt Foundation’s trustees, Bruce Jackson, and his family present conflicts of interest that cast doubt on their motives in fighting the Seneca casino in downtown Buffalo.

Fist of all, Alan, thanks for reading and responding.

Rarely do I defend what AV columnists or what they write. I figure we have our own platform and it’s big enough; once we publish, it’s everyone else’s turn. But this time, happily, I have a few facts to add to the mix:

1. Rachel and Michael Jackson have never been paid a cent by the Wendt Foundation for their work on the casino lawsuit;

2. Bruce Jackson applied and got a grant from Wendt on behalf of the Market Arcade for a new digital projector for the cinema, not for himself; the Market Arcade is a public theater owned by the city of Buffalo and run by a volunteer board; the digital projector is used for screenings by a wide variety of Buffalo nonprofit community organizations;

3. AV has never failed to acknowledge Jackson’s former role as vice president of Citizens for a Better Buffalo in his casino articles, either in a tag at the end of the piece or in the body of the article; besides, no one has ever accused an AV writer of being unbiased;

4. Wendt’s trustees don’t track their stock portfolio any more than does the average person with money in a retirement account (quick, without looking—how much of your retirement account is invested in pharmaceuticals? what precisely does the bank where you keep deposits do with your cash?);

5. and even if they had, Wendt divested. Maybe the foundation’s investment manager divested in order to clear a possible forthcoming conflict of interest; maybe he or she sold because it was a good time to sell. I don’t have an answer to that, and neither do Alan and Chris.

What they do have is innuendo. They’ll reply that Jackson’s article traded in innuendo as well—a suggestion that someone, somewhere, whispered this line of attack against the Wendt Foundation, an attack that ignores the motives and the merits of the lawsuit that Wendt Foundation money is supporting and directs attention away from the implications of Judge Skretny’s ruling. Alan is stung by the innuendo that he was party to a conspiracy to discredit the foundation’s motives.

Fair enough. What Bruce asked is (so far) an open-ended question: Where did the line of attack on this institution, which has never before been accused of anything but generosity, originate? Who thought of it? Bruce and I both posed that question to Mike Beebe at the Buffalo News, who responded. Neither of us asked Alan how he’d been inspired to write about it. Maybe we should have, though I don’t think Bruce accused Alan of anything more than having written a post about it. Fact is, we were both more interested in how Beebe came to write his story.

I certainly believe Alan when he says he conspired with no one, that he heard this line of argument on the radio and TV, was interested, and so wrote a post about it. (I also assumed, being a regular reader and a fan, that he would swing back. I looked forward to seeing where his shot would land.)

But you don’t have to be one of the original whisperers of a damaging rumor to be a party to swiftboating; if you’re part of the echo chamber that amplifies and spreads the rumor, then you’re contributing to its apparent legitimacy. In the case of attacks on John Kerry that gave birth to the verb, no one would argue that a thousand bloggers and talk radio hosts met in a hotel room somewhere and devised a strategy. But someone met somewhere to discuss ways to use Kerry’s service record against him, devised a strategy, and unleashed it; and like-minded bloggers and talk radio hosts fell into the roles the plotters hoped they would take. The “objective,” “mainstream” media happily called the action from the press box, turning the blood sport into our national pastime for a good two months. The damage to Kerry’s reputation and campaign was immense.

Bruce believes (as do I) that some party is trying to damage the Wendt Foundation’s reputation in order to scare away the trustees from funding this lawsuit to its conclusion—and, for that matter, from taking stands in the future on potentially controversial issues that the trustees believe affect the welfare of this community. (That is their brief, essentially: to promote the community’s welfare.)

So Alan wrote about an argument that caught his attention; Jackson speculated about the argument’s originators and their motives; Alan and Chris swung back hard because they’re good sportsmen and are versed in the devilish art of opposition research; and I know, by responding, that I am sending a high, weak lob back to them, to do with what they’d like.

Your turn, fellas. While you decide, however, I am once again leaving the court.

Just when it seemed that Buffalo was poised to join the elite list of glamorous places like the newly opened Downstream Casino, located in the middle of, well, somewhere—seven miles from Joplin, Missouri and 17 miles from Miami, Oklahoma—US District Judge William M. Skretny steps in to spoil the party down on old Fulton Street by citing the law.

As of today, the temporary casino downtown is operating outside the law, and the fate of the Seneca’s $330 million permanent casino/hotel/restaurant/spa, already under construction, is in question.

Will his decision help or hurt the second poorest city in the country? Read his ruling here.

Bruce Jackson has just posted this essay by former Congressman John LaFalce over at Buffalo Report:

On June 25, 2008, a gigantic struggle took place on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives involving casino gambling in the State of Michigan. That controversy and struggle is highly instructive on the question of the legality of casino gambling in Buffalo.

Two titans of the House, John Dingell (D-Mich), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and John Conyers (D-Mich), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stood in opposing corners and came out fighting.

Rep. Dingell wants a casino in Port Huron, and doesn’t want the issue to go to the U.S. Department of Interior for its review. So he is trying to “legislatively” bypass Interior review, and permit casino gambling in Port Huron by mandating that the Secretary of the Interior “shall” take into trust certain land as part of a land claim settlement. The bill at least recognized that the land had to be taken into trust.

Rep. Conyers says he opposes gambling in principle, but also doesn’t want another casino in Michigan, which would compete with the casino that already exists in his city of Detroit. Conyers also argued it would be wrong to bypass the Interior Department’s review as to whether it should take it into trust, especially since he is confident Interior will render a negative opinion. An overwhelming majority of the House agreed with Conyers, and defeated the attempted bypass by a vote of 121 to 298.

So how is this relevant to Buffalo?

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