It’s not easy to find anything that almost everyone agrees on these days, when 40 percent is enough to win an election and 55 percent is considered a landslide.
So when more than four out of five people answer a poll question the same way, politicians ought to take notice.
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That happened last week, when the market research firm Critical Insights released its spring survey.
Mainers were asked who should decide future expansions of gambling in the state, members of the Legislature or the people themselves.
Overwhelmingly, these Mainers said that they would be the best judge of whether the state needed any more gambling facilities. According to the poll, 87 percent of respondents said they wanted to be asked before a new casino opened its doors.
That’s understandable. Just last November, voters turned down three new gambling facilities, including a new casino in Lewiston and a pair of racetrack slot parlors in Biddeford and Washington County.
Undeterred, the Legislature went back to work this winter and passed a law that would let nonprofit groups set up as many as five slot machines, potentially expanding that form of gambling to every corner of the state.
The law would allow as many as 250 slot machines to operate statewide, creating the equivalent of another casino, without getting the voters’ approval. On the heels of last year’s referendum, that shows disdain for the voters who said that they did not want a further expansion.
The bill is on Gov. LePage’s desk, and he has shown that he is not shy about using his veto pen. The governor should use his power on this bill and kill this idea before it kills fragile small-town economies by sucking out money that would otherwise be spent locally.
Maine deserves a time-out on gambling expansion, if only to see whether the market will support the two casinos that we soon will have. If there is space for more expansion, the state should go through a deliberative licensing process, maximizing the benefit for Maine and minimizing the amount of local money lost at the tables.
But even then, the final say should go to the voters, as the Mainers who were polled said so clearly.
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