Casino & Bingo: CO Bingo Damage

Black Hawk smoking rooms illegal
November 1, 2007
April M. Washington
Plans called ‘clear violation’ of ban that starts Jan. 1
Black Hawk casinos not wanting to leave smokers out in the cold this winter are building swanky enclosed and semi-enclosed patios and terraces.
Smoke-Free Gaming Colorado said such plans violate the state’s smoking ban, which only allows smokers to light up on open-air outdoor patios that are not boxed in by brick walls, fancy windows and glass doors.
On Wednesday, the anti-tobacco group sent letters to the city of Black Hawk as well as to casinos demanding they comply with state law.
Come New Year’s Day, a statewide smoking ban will extend to gambling houses in Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek. The state legislature last spring pulled casinos’ initial exemption from the law enacted in 2006.
“Some casinos in Black Hawk are planning these lavish indoor smoking areas, where smokers can come and watch big-screen TVs,” said Stephanie Steinberg of Smoke-Free Gaming. “It’s our opinion that this is a clear violation of the state law. To be open-air it can’t be enclosed.”
A review of 10 building plans show that casinos in Black Hawk are erecting enclosed and semi-enclosed terraces as well as outdoor, rooftop smoking patios and decks.
Colorado Central Station Casino is building two stone, glass-covered smoking terraces.
The Riviera Casino is constructing three bricked, roof and glassed-covered smoking rooms with one wall knocked out at the end of the structures for air flow.
The management of both the Colorado Central Station Casino and the Riviera Casino declined to comment and referred calls to corporate offices, which did not return phone calls Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Fitzgerald’s Casino is constructing a rooftop patio complete with awnings and infrared heaters, a setup that would seemingly comply with state law.
The Gilpin Hotel Casino and Lodge Casino are building smoking decks, with roof coverings and infrared heaters.
The casinos’ architect, Paul Pushnik, said most gaming parlors are putting in open-air, canopy-covered patios to provide gamblers with weather protection
Workers in smoky rooms
Casinos continue to fret over what the smoking ban will mean to their bottom line.
In Black Hawk, there has been some confusion surrounding the definition of “open air” and state guidelines for outdoor patios, said Pushnik, of Denver-based River Studio Architects.
“The real question is what does open air mean,” he said. “To be open air it can’t be enclosed is my understanding.
“But some casinos are putting windscreens on. I’ve seen a few different designs like the Riviera where they opened an exterior wall and built a room and put an open-air area on the end of it.”
State law defines an indoor area as any enclosed or partially enclosed area. It further states that the opening of windows, or doors or temporary removal of wall panels does not convert an indoor area into an outdoor one.
Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, who pushed to include casinos in the statewide smoking ban, argues that semi-enclosed smoking areas will do little to protect casino workers from exposure to second-hand smoke.
“The open air has to freely pass through the patios so you can’t use solid walls and windows as screeners,” he said. “Our intent was to make sure the people working in casinos aren’t doing it in smoke-filled rooms.”
Building codes, state law
The city of Black Hawk has reviewed and approved most casinos’ building plans for patios.
State law requires local governments to enforce the smoking ban.
Black Hawk City Manager Richard Lessner said his staff has advised casinos that their plans for smoking patios and terraces should comply with state law.
“We’re not reaching judgment on whether they’re in compliance with the smoking law or not,” he said. “We simply make sure they are in compliance with building codes.”
Casinos in Central City say Black Hawk has allowed casinos there to skirt state law.
Historic preservation laws in Central City prevent casinos from building outdoor patios.
Smokers visiting the Doc Holliday Casino there will have to puff away outside in the cold.
“As far as I’m concerned, patios mean outdoors with cold wind blowing your skirt up,” said Greg Wilson, manager of Doc Holiday.

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Smoking ban helps wring the life out of bingo nights
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July 14, 2007
Bill Johnson

I hate to keep harping on this, but this one is personal. The Bingo Mine is going out of business.
I hate the smoking ban. Call this the hate column, if you will. But this thing is ruining people’s lives.

And yes, I love bingo.

I got hooked on it during the couple of weeks I got off after returning from Iraq the last time. I guess I was in search of something quiet, very solitary, with a potentially big payoff for my troubles. The anti-Iraq.

Way too many people gave it to me – not just for liking bingo, but loving it. Even my kids were all over me.

“Are you really getting that old, Dad?” my son, Ben, told me every time I would gather up my multi-colored markers. Even my wife laughed hysterically when I first told her of where I had been.

And then, settling down, she asked: “Can I go?”

I loved it even though I am a notoriously awful gambler. It is a certainty that I couldn’t pick the winner in a one-horse race. A couple of weeks later, I took her.

Her first night working the boards, she won twice – a $100 “postage stamp” haul and, later, the $500, session-ending “black-out” bonanza. I had been going for months and never won a penny.

Soon, I had the whole family – including Ben – wielding marking pens.

It has been two years. Kirsten has won multiple times. I have yet to yell, “Bingo!”

So we were planning to go Friday night. Friday night bingo might well be bingo nirvana. Other players are extremely nice and welcoming. Mothers wheel in babies. Couples bond over their array of boards, some rubbing the good luck charms they place around their boards before the first number falls.

It turned out, there are no Friday night games anymore. I called Larry Stallcup.

He has owned the Bingo Mine for almost exactly 20 years.

“Oh, it was fabulous back then,” Larry Stallcup, now 73 years old, recalled. He would have 170 to 180 people inside, marking boards, every night. “For bingo, even in Lafayette, that is quite a few people.”

It remained that way until 1990 when the first of the Black Hawk and Central City casinos opened. He immediately lost some 22 percent of his customers, he said.

Still, business remained steady and quite survivable until last July when the statewide smoking ban went into effect, which he estimates has cost him at least another 18 percent of his clientele.

“There is so much competition for the entertainment dollar these days,” Larry Stallcup said. “I guess I just couldn’t keep up.”

The smoking ban, he says, wasn’t the total death knell. The groups that ran the games suddenly found it, frankly, not worth their effort to schedule them. Who would show?

Evenings over the past year became a wasteland.

And with little revenue coming in, and with a $12,000-a-month lease payment to make, Larry Stallcup, a former police chief of Lafayette, discovered he simply couldn’t make it anymore.

He plans to close the place when his lease runs out in March.

“People just are not showing up the way they used to. Is it smoking? It has a lot to do with it. People hate having to step outside to do it. It affected business.”

Boulder Swim Team, which ran the Friday night games, got out because of it, he said. Attendance had plummeted.

So he is now looking for replacement groups. He thinks he can get the Lions to pick up Friday nights, Larry Stallcup says. It will continue to be a struggle, he adds, until he finds another, cheaper place to land come March. He is now scouting joints in Broomfield and Thornton.

American Legion Post No. 111 has long run the best games inside the Mine. It still runs a Wednesday noon game, but abandoned its Monday afternoon sessions shortly after the smoking ban hit.

“We lost, I’d say, 35 percent of our players,” Gary Force, the post commander, explained. “For a while there, it was really bad. And it was all the smoking ban.”

He believes the post has regained now maybe a third of the players lost a year ago, yet the numbers remain not at all what they were before the ban.

And wherever Larry Stallcup goes, Gary Force says the post likely will follow.

“We’re flexible,” he said, “and we will move with him as long as he doesn’t go too far away. It has to be accessible for our membership, which does all the volunteering.”

You need to know of the Bingo Mine and its demise because it is a very good snapshot of the relative-havoc a bad law, which is the smoking ban, has engendered.

Perhaps many of you are right: Things certainly will equal out.

I just wonder at what cost.

In this case, of course it is only bingo. Yet the people it benefited most were those who the service agencies who ran the games used their scant profits to assist, mostly the young and elderly.

OK, maybe I am taking that too far.

But I don’t think so.