Michele Deegan

Michelle Deegan, and I am a Professor of Political Science here at Muhlenberg College. I am also involved in community based research with the Lehigh Valley Research Consortium.

Yes. So back when a group of us from all of the LVAIC colleges were starting the LVRC--that creation of the research organization happened at the same time that we knew that the casino act had just passed or the act that allowed for there to be casinos in Pennsylvania. And we knew at that time that Governor Rendell was--he was suggesting that the Lehigh Valley was going to be one of the initial sites for a casino. So I thought, as the director of the LVRC, I thought, 'this is a study where we don't have to wait for a client. A natural experiment is happening right in front of us. We've got to do something.' So thankfully because we have the polling institute here at Muhlenberg College, I was able to 00:01:00work with Dr. Borick who also helped me to start the LVRC. And we said, 'let's do a survey,' because he does public opinion surveys. 'Let's do a public opinion survey just to kind of get people's opinion about the casino or gambling in Pennsylvania, regardless of where the casino ultimately happens.' So our first study that we did back in 2007-2008 was really before we even knew that the license was going to go to Bethlehem. If you remember, and from talking to other folks, you know that Allentown was also making a pitch for the casino. So we weren't sure at that time if it was going to be Allentown or Bethlehem. So our first study was asking, 'Generally speaking, are you gambling, number one. Where are you gambling? What kind of gambling are you doing? And then two, would you think this is going to have-- questions about impact-- do you think gambling will have a positive or negative impact on residents, crime, economic development in the Lehigh Valley?

You know, if I were to say our target population, it was probably public interest and also just to think through some of the stakeholders, as well, of the lawmaking bodies within the Lehigh Valley, particularly at the county level. Because we knew that the way the legislation was written, the counties were going to have a lot of responsibility with regard to following through with the revenues that were generated. And certainly not just at the county level, but for Allentown and Bethlehem, we wanted them to know what people's concerns were about gambling so that they could preemptively think about the concerns, particularly of traffic congestion, crime and economic development. What level of importance those issues were to to the residents.

The way that we collected the survey data was to utilize the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, and the polling institute relies on phone surveys. 00:03:00So we have our students who work at the polling institute, and then sometimes we have to contract out the labor to have a large enough phone sample. It's a phone survey that includes both mobile phones and landlines.

All of the research that we try and do at the LVRC is to inform the community first and foremost. So we see that with our knowledge and skills of how to conduct research that we want our research to be a part of the decision making process. So the decision making process certainly of policy makers, elected officials, but also so that we have more informed citizens. So that citizens are aware that, 'Hey there's a casino going in.' And here's, again, how people are engaged with the casino and what their concerns happen to 00:04:00be. So it was, you know, very much anytime we do our research we always think not just about who our client might be, if we get hired by, say, a hospital, but we also think, 'How is this going to contribute to the greater good of knowledge and with disseminating information to the community?'

The first time that we did the study, I did a literature review of what the gambling literature said about some of the key issues that people have with casino gambling. And a lot of the literature was around this issue of problem gambling. The first two public opinion surveys that we did really tried to identify problem gamblers. That is a very specific psychological test that you administer to somebody that has a battery of questions that makes a survey very, very long. So what we really initially realized, probably the second time that 00:05:00we completed the opinion poll, is that there were so few people who were even initially identified by the first filter questions that they were heavy gamblers, that we needed to continue to ask these types of very specific questions. So right away we realized, 'OK, there aren't as many people gambling or seem to have problem gambling as we thought, or even gambled as as we initially thought there might be.' And so the biggest difference, I guess, was taking a lot of those kind of questions out of the survey and gearing it more towards, one, a public opinion survey measuring behaviors and perceptions. But then, two, once the counties were required by law to engage in providing data back to the state, the county--Northhampton County--asked us to conduct the study, and then we started to gather data from county officials, conducting focus groups and interviews, and then we collected data on crime that was 00:06:00available. Then we also evolved to a content analysis of the news media. We started just with a public opinion survey, and then we triangulated our data sources to our last iteration which looked at the issue from four different perspectives.

So what was interesting about the results initially-- and I was at the the public hearings that we had. So there was a public hearing at Broughal, and I was at that public hearing. It was so exciting to be there. There were union people who wanted the casinos to be built, and there were people really against the casinos for lots of different reasons. Walking away from that anecdotally and thinking about the literature as well, my hypothesis would have been that there would have been an increase in crime. I'll never forget one of the folks 00:07:00who talked at Broughal about why we shouldn't bring a casino. I remember her vividly shouting at the the the elected officials who were on the panel, saying that this is going to bring mass amounts of prostitution and crime to the South Side that will change this whole town. So you had people who were striking fear into everyone. And I certainly had read of the particular places that she was providing examples, so I knew in some instances that that had actually happened. So my hypothesis was that these things would happen therefore, and that didn't turn out to happen at all. Initially, again before even the first slot machine was ready to go, that initial survey in particular, public opinion was that crime would increase, economic development would be positive, but that traffic would be horrible, as well. Traffic and 00:08:00crime would increase. Economic development would increase, too. But people didn't see that necessarily as a bad thing. Over time what we have found is that the economic development has increased, but the crime and the traffic-- people don't perceive it as being as big of an issue or as bad off as they initially thought it was. I mean without a doubt there's traffic, without a doubt there's more crime, but it's not the level of crime that I think people anticipated. Even myself after listening to folks. And it's a different type of crime than I think we expected initially would happen.

The casinos have put a strain on the social service organizations around the casino, and that is occurring because we have large numbers of people from 00:09:00Queens and Long Island who are being bused into the Sands Casino. And those individuals aren't gambling. They are spending their day, their eight hours or whatever the shift happens to be for how long until their bus leaves, out in the neighborhoods. These people tend to be underresourced, and so they come here and have realized that we have food pantries. That we have no opportunities for them to seek shelter while they're here during the day. And so they have been using these resources in ways that no one really anticipated.

Relatedly some of the crime that has been created has been because of the petty theft that has been happening in and around the casino because of the folks from out of town who are coming in to spend the day. And so one of the other interesting unexpected findings was that one--and this I realized after I was 00:10:00talking with the Police Chief in the City of Bethlehem. Further investigations with the county revealed that the county budget, for example at the magisterial level, they had gone into the red with their budgeted amounts for translators because the petty theft that had happened the people who were committing those crimes or alleged crimes didn't speak English as their first language. And they spoke different dialects of the Chinese language--at least four different dialects that I can think of. Which meant that in Northampton County, which doesn't have a large population of individuals who speak these different dialects, the county had to pay to have translators to come in to the court to be able to translate. So where we thought the budget would increase for police or to try and fight crime that was somehow related to to prostitution 00:11:00or to armed robbery or whatever we expected--it was really the budget for the courts that had seen the most stress since the inception of the casino. That was kind of a really fascinating, unexpected finding for us.

Yeah. Again just to try and understand perceptions. We can measure perception by looking at individuals' perceptions, but then we also wanted to get a sense of how the media's framing gambling. We thought it was very important to see if there was media bias. And see if there was media bias, if somehow the media bias was, we felt, impacting what the individuals responses happen to be for particular questions. So we primarily analyzed The Morning Call and The Express 00:12:00Times, and it was interesting that there weren't that many articles actually that were published about the casino. And there was a diversity of stories, so there wasn't really any main pattern positive or negative. So tone we couldn't really tell if it was, you know, leaning against casinos versus favoring. The articles tend to mostly be more about events that were happening or, you know, just more factual than they seem to have any kind of bias to them.

How accessible people were varied. We were not able to contact anybody from the Sands Casino when we reached out to them. We made attempts to even contact the State Police because of the way that crime data is reported. You know title 00:13:00versus carpet. The State Police has data that happens, you know, within the carpeted area of the casino. We did not get any response back from the State Police and trying to go and look at their information that they had available wasn't helping us at all. So we kind of said, 'that's not going to work.' So Sands and the State Police were not responsive to us, but everybody else was very happy to talk about the issue. And quite honestly some were eager to talk about the issue, particularly those people in the social service organizations who said, 'look we're struggling here to meet the needs of the community who lives here. We need some help to be able to work with the people who need help who are coming to us from outside of the community.' So everyone for the most part was was very happy and happy to talk to us except for the Sands.

I certainly hope, though, that that initial partnership that Sands and the City brokered in the sense of the community around the Sands getting some financial support and the Sands being more receptive to their footprint--I hope that we can return to that. I think that has been lost over the last bunch of years, and that if they're going to be good neighbors right and good citizens of this city that they really need to engage better with the immediate