By Dan Miner
Iowa has quietly become a gambler’s paradise. Since 1983 its legislature, in phases, has legalized everything from horse and dog track betting to state lotteries to casinos, and they’ve all thrived like the state’s famous corn. Yet with a few exceptions, Iowa newspapers have shed little light on gambling’s dark side, including its drain on local economies and the stress it puts on undermanned police departments. For Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, that absence was a grievous oversight, and if the state’s press wouldn’t explore the impact of gambling on Iowa, then his students would. This winter, Bloom, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, turned his twelve master’s students loose on Riverside, a tiny town soon to become home to Iowa’s largest casino resort.
It was to Riverside (population 928) that the second-generation gambling mogul Dan Kehl came in the summer of 2004, wearing a flannel shirt, and pitched surprised residents on a plan to construct a $100 million casino and resort just two miles outside town. Less than three months later a heavily promoted countywide referendum approved the project by a 52-48 percent margin. Riverside Casino and Golf Resort is set to open September 10.
Local media covered the referendum, but there was little investigative reporting on the many ways the casino could change people’s lives and fortunes in Riverside. Bloom’s class began digging and uncovered a compelling story involving a high-powered lobbying firm, a bitterly divided community, and a state addicted to gambling revenues.
Dubbed the Riverside Project, the final product — twenty stories and around 19,000 words — ran on May 5 as a twenty-four-page, ad-free tabloid insert in The Daily Iowan, an independent newspaper that rents space in the University of Iowa’s journalism building and hires students as reporters. As it happened, the package ran on the same day as a display advertisement from the casino, which was looking for employees. Referring to publisher Bill Casey’s decision to publish the investigative project, with possible casino ad revenues at stake, Bloom said, “He’s a courageous guy.” All the more so considering the information Bloom’s students turned up.
One student reporter, Jason Pulliam, detailed how Kehl funded a pro-casino group, Washington County Citizens for Good Jobs committee, to the tune of $469,000. The committee, in turn, hired The Strategy Group, an Evanston, Illinois-based political consulting firm, to ensure victory in the August referendum by shellacking Riverside with television and radio advertisements, pro-casino leaflets, and paid vote canvassers. In contrast, the grass-roots opposition, Communities Against Riverboat Expansion, spent just short of $10,000.
Another reporter, Stephen Grant, focused on how Riverside, which doesn’t have its own police department, would handle a predicted 1.6 million visitors a year along with the “theft, vandalism, fake IDs, public intoxication, and alcohol-related domestic abuse,” associated with another casino across the state. The police, it turns out, are wondering the same thing. “I don’t like the idea of wait-and-see,” Washington County Sheriff Jerry Dunbar says in the story, referring to his desire to hire two new deputies in advance of the casino, despite the mayor’s reluctance.
Reporter Sonia Gunderson’s dogged pursuit of interviews with the typically apolitical Amish members of Kalona, a community seven miles west of Riverside, turned up concerns about Amish goods being sold at the casino, about rising crime, and the effects of a spike in rural land values.
While Pulliam and Grant looked at the big picture, reporters Angie Toomsen and Erik Farseth explored the personal stories of Iowa’s gamblers, profiling a pair of recovering gambling addicts as well as a supervisor at a propane-tank assembly plant who won $1.87 million at another casino across the border in Missouri. That balance was typical of the care the students took to cast both a critical and comprehensive eye on their subject.
The student reporters also discovered how a growing dependence on gambling revenue has influenced state policy. That revenue, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is spread among various state-funded healthcare, infrastructure, tourism-promotion, and environmental initiatives. The students found that this breeds an unabashedly pro-gambling state legislature in Des Moines and a substantial pro-gambling lobby in the state. Which, one would hope, will sooner or later attract the attention of the rest of the state’s press.
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