As Reston Patch has reported on several occasions in recent months, our very own Comstock Properties is pressing the State legislature to allow the construction of a gambling casino along the Silver Line that runs through Reston. From Comstock’s perspective, it’s a moneymaker, but for Reston it offers only more criminal activity and some lower paying jobs.
State Senator David Marsden (D) of Burke has been leading the legislative charge, including his introduction and then withdrawal of a proposal to build a casino outside the beltway near a station along the Silver Line. That leaves Tysons and Reston as targets. He told Reston Patch he plans to introduce an expanded casino bill in the next legislative session to include a performance space and conference center at Tysons, but with a quick stroke of a pen that could become Reston.
Heaven knows Comstock is putting a lot of money into a casino coming to its property around Reston Station at Wiehle Avenue. So far, it has hired six lobbyists through its hospitality subsidiary and created “Building a Remarkable Virginia” PAC that has contributed more than $500,000 to Virgina state political candidates (including $109K to Marsden and Sen. Surovell, another local casino proponent). Virtually all the money is from Comstock executives or others closely associated with Comstock.
What no one has done in the Virginia legislature is look at the social impacts of opening of a casino—with or without a hotel and conference center—anywhere in the state, including Reston. And it is not an easy task.
A literature search shows that there have been over 100,000 studies of the various impacts of casino gambling on communities and beyond. Most are economic analyses, only a few look at societal effects. Some are huge meta-analyses—studies of studies--while others are very narrow and usually esoteric. Some are time-specific while others are longitudinal. The main issue is that most are prepared by both professional advocates of gambling, including gambling associations, and others who virulently oppose gambling, mostly on religious grounds. In between is a variety of academic research that is more generally balanced in its assessments.
In looking at the criminal effects of gambling casinos on communities and surrounding areas, one study appears to stand out: Casinos, Crime, and Community Costs, written by two distinguished professors and published in 2004.[i][1] As the abstract states:
We examine the relationship between casinos and crime using county-level data for the United States between 1977 and 1996. Casinos were nonexistent outside Nevada before 1978, and expanded to many other states during our sample period. Most factors that reduce crime occur before or shortly after a casino opens, whereas those that increase crime, including problem and pathological gambling, occur over time. The results suggest that the effect on crime is low shortly after a casino opens, and grows over time. Roughly 8% of crime in casino counties in 1996 was attributable to casinos, costing the average adult $75 per year.
It is comprehensive, systematic, longitudinal, and balanced. About the only question it cannot address, is how much has changed since 1996. There is no obvious reason why anything has changed to generate substantially different results in one direction or the other.
The clearest representation of the impact of a casino opening on crime rates is the graph below showing the change in the crime rate index from two years before to five years after the opening of a casino. As the paper states, “Crime rates were stable prior to opening, slightly lower in the year of casino introduction, returned to approximately average levels for the next two or three years, and increased thereafter. By the fifth year after introduction, robbery, aggravated assaults, auto theft, burglary, larceny, rape, and murder were 136, 91, 78, 50, 38, 21, and 12 percent higher, respectively.
Crime Before & After Casino Opening: Casino Counties Omitting Florida in 1988, 1996
The report concludes that, “between 5.5 and 30 percent of the different crimes in casino counties can be attributed to casinos. This translates into a social crime cost associated with casinos of $75 per adult in 1996. This figure does not include other social costs related to casinos, such as crime in neighboring counties, direct regulatory costs, costs related to employment and lost productivity, social service, and welfare costs. Overall, 8.6 percent of property crime and 12.6 percent of violent crime in counties with casinos was due to the presence of the casino.”
This increase in crime rate translates into substantial increases in financial costs for Fairfax County. Using the same method used in the source analysis and accounting for inflation ($1.00 in 1996 is $1.98 in 2023), Fairfax County’s adult population as inferred by the US Census for 2022, county costs—and our taxes—would need to increase by $130 million to cover the criminal costs generated by a casino, excluding other social costs.
Against this added cost, a 2019 consultant’s report to the state legislature’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission forecasts a variety of tax revenue enhancements resulting from the presence of a casino in northern Virginia. Here are its forecasts for 2028 where available as applied to Fairfax County:
Estimated Fairfax County Tax Revenues from a Casino ($ Millions)
Fairfax Share of State Casino Revenue Tax 2028 (6%) $18.6 MM
County Property Tax Revenues $13.0 MM
Indirect/Induced County Property Tax Revenues $ 8.7 MM
Local Sales Tax (0%) --0—__
Total $40.3 MM
The clear implication of these financial calculations is that Fairfax County will be some $90 million in the hole per year because of the additional crime generated by allowing a casino to be built in the county. And this does not examine any of the non-criminal tax costs on county operations of the presence of a casino.[2] [ii] It also does not consider the indirect of effects on county revenues from those corporations and people who decide not to develop, build, buy, rent, shop, or play here because of a casino presence. Instead of a revenue generator for the county, a casino would be a costly added tax burden.
At the same time as the tax burden becomes heavier, so would the risk of being a victim of crime. Using FBI data for Fairfax County on violent and property crimes reported annually through the Incident Based Reporting (IBR) system, the authors foresee increased crime from the presence of a casino. In Fairfax County, using FCPD 2022 IBR data (the latest available), that would mean some 3,500 additional incidents of felonious violent or property crime, an 8.9% increase in the county’s crime rate. This at a time when the county can’t fill the police officer vacancies it has despite higher pay and bonuses. And, if the casino is in Reston, a disproportionate share of that added crime would almost certainly be here, having a major impact on Restonians’ quality of life.
Overall, the building of a casino in Reston, Tysons, or somewhere else in Fairfax County is not likely to generate any substantial long-term benefits and, in fact, will almost certainly see costly increases in crime and other disruptive community effects as well as tax increases to control and mitigate the casino’s adverse effect. Still, politicians, starting with State Senator David Marsden and including members of Fairfax County’s own Board of Supervisors, ignore these consequences because of a shortsighted and wrongheaded view of increased tax revenues.
We, as residents of Reston, must make sure that all these politicians understand the negative consequences of a casino on our community and county. · In the short term, please let our county state legislators know what you think about a casino before their January 4, 2004, by sending an e-mail to LegislativeTeam@fairfaxcounty.gov.
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In the short term, please let our county state legislators know what you think about a casino before their January 4, 2004, by sending an e-mail to LegislativeTeam@fairfaxcounty.gov.
You may want to include our Board of Supervisors (ClerktotheBOS@fairfaxcounty.gov) as an addee on that e-mail to make sure they understand our concerns and objections.
- Please also “friend” the Citizens Opposed to Reston Casino (CORC) webpage on Facebook for the latest information on the proposed legislation and Reston’s effort to de-rail it.
- And finally, to keep up on news of the casino legislation’s progress, bookmark NoRestonCasino.org.
Stopping the construction of a casino
in Reston is critical to sustaining our quality of life in the face of
corporate greed and government overreach.
Your help is critical in this effort,
1. This report was first published in 2000 as a working paper and has been enhanced several times through 2009 at least. The data are the same in all the versions, 1977-1996. This post relies on the 2004 version.
2. According to the study being used here, other research indicates crime costs generally represent about 40% of the total social costs of a casino. That would mean the total social cost of a Fairfax County casino would be on the order of $325 million per year for Fairfax residents.
