 Hi, and welcome to today's Healthy Marriage. I'm your host, Charlene Lammers, Executive Director for Great Marriages for Sheboygan County. Today I'd like to welcome Father Karl Schoffenberg to our program. Father is the pastor for Grace Episcopal Church here in Sheboygan. He was also the COO of a biotech company and an attorney, and he is someone who has first-hand knowledge of living in a community with a casino, so you may guess that today's topic is living in a casino community. Hi Father. Good afternoon. Welcome to today's Healthy Marriage. Thank you. So how long have you lived in Sheboygan? You're not a native to Sheboygan. Just about a hundred days now, moved here early November. Okay, so you're counting the days, a hundred days, there you go. What attracted you to Sheboygan? Why did you decide to move here? Well, I was called here by the local Episcopal Church, and I had gone to seminary in Wisconsin, and so I was familiar with this church. Okay. What do you know about Sheboygan, or did you like the idea of coming to our community? Yeah, Sheboygan has a lot of things going for it in terms of location, with lots of recreational opportunities around. It's a good, solid community based on a manufacturing economy, and so it's got some things that you don't find in other communities in terms of selection in the arts, in restaurants, in all kinds of cultural opportunities that are hard to find elsewhere. We're kind of prejudiced, but we think it's a great place to live, you know. We've been recommended by others as a top place to raise families, and did you know any of that before you came? I did. Looking at one of those guides to top places to live in America. Just to get more information on the place, yes. Okay. So you're currently an Episcopalian priest. Can you share a little bit about your previous job experiences and maybe why you chose to change your line of work? Sure. I've been a priest for five and a half years. This is my second church, and before that I was a priest in the diocese of Mississippi. Before that I started out originally as a lawyer in private practice and was doing a fair amount of litigation relating to drug products, ended up getting hired by a drug company as a result and basically handling the litigation in-house for the drug company and then moving over to the development side of the company. Practiced law for about four years private and then four years in-house and then was in the general management in pharmaceuticals and biotech in, oh, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Germany, and England, and part of my general management role related to economic development, site selection for a 90 million dollar biotech plant we built, for example, and also related to sort of long range strategic planning, looking at what was happening in the economy and also what was happening with your competition. Wow. That's fascinating. That's quite a history. Well, it was a pretty good career. I ended up leaving that career and going to seminary based on a couple of factors. One was I thought about going to seminary for a very long time and always had a reason to postpone it, kind of ran out of reasons, and at the same time also ran into, oh, I'll just call it a dispute with my board of directors that I consider to be a moral issue, so it was time to resign and go do what I was supposed to do anyway. Good. So you said you lived in Mississippi prior to coming here. Yes. What kind of community was that? Was it large? Was it similar? No. The town where we lived was a smaller community of about 13,000. Had been basically manufacturing as well as agriculture. A lot of the manufacturing was going away. I was very familiar with a couple of other communities around the state that were either based on universities or casinos as well as the fishing fleet and things of that sort. Okay. So kind of similar as far as manufacturing and agriculture. Yes. There's two big things that we have here in Sheboygan County as well. So there's a group of individuals working in Sheboygan County, specifically in Sheboygan to bring a casino here to our community. So being that we're about healthy marriages and families, we thought perhaps that would be a good topic for us to talk about. And you, having lived in a community with casinos and having experiences in a community such as that, we'd like to talk to you about a couple of topics. So you saw firsthand the effects of what a casino does to a community and you have certain observations on that. Would you like to talk about any potential changes that we may be seeing in Sheboygan County? If a casino comes here, any ideas to the kinds of changes that may occur? Yeah. That's what I really want to focus on because I'm sitting here in a priest's collar and so it's natural for people to think that I'm going to talk about the moral side of gambling. And there's a lot we can say about that, but I don't think that's what your viewers really want to hear on a show like this. What they want to know is what's the impact in their lives in an economic sense and in a quality of life sense. And what I found once a community became a casino community, there were some significant changes. Now, you can find all kinds of data talking about changes in whether or not you see different demand for police services and things like that. And that varies by region, but I can tell you some things that are pretty much constant. Money is, there's the idea that you're going to get a lot of new jobs with a casino. And in terms of raw numbers, you do create some jobs, not as many as people think. But this is at the expense of other jobs. And so you have to look at the net gain of a casino versus the net draw on social services and on the economy overall. For example, if you're a downtown merchant and you have something that involves discretionary income, a restaurant, a boutique, what you find is that the discretionary income goes to the casino and that the downtown restaurants and boutiques take quite a hit. A lot of them go out of business. The second effect is longer term. And that's an overall long term depression in real earnings. People's income starts going down over time. Because what happens is you start shifting your economy over from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. And it takes a while for that to happen. But the net effect is when I was back in biotech and we were looking to put in a biotech plant and spend $90 million to bring in 450 jobs as well, high paying jobs, we would look at what were the essential skills we needed in the community. And in a manufacturing business, you need people with manufacturing experience. As the economy starts shifting over to a service based economy, you don't find those people. And so it's sort of like a long term downward trend on real wages. Even if you keep the same number of jobs, they pay less. And there's less revenue for the economy, less tax revenue for the city, while the demand for services is going up. So there are a lot of costs for a casino, and these are quite apart from the social costs. The social costs that I got to see as parish priests were the sort of social costs that people would see in any church or service organization where they're dealing with charity cases. When somebody walks in your door, and they need help, and they need help because they can't pay the utility bill, or they can't get enough food on the table. Most of the people who come to churches are not the poorest of the poor. There's a safety net. There's Medicaid, there's WIC, there are all kinds of programs available if people fall below the poverty line. Where people get trapped is when they're the working poor. And now they can't pay a utility bill because it was a really cold month or something like that. Well, that's where people start seeing a lot more people coming to churches. And it's because whatever extra income there was, whatever cushion there was, it went to the casino. Now I don't know what the statistics are in reality for how many people are problem gamblers. It's a less nice word than problem gambler addicts. The casino industry will tell you it's about one percent, but those are their data. I don't know any other studies. I've seen statistics as high as five and six percent. The fact of the matter is this is the big revenue stream in a casino community. It's not the casual gambler. It's the problem gambler. It's the addict. Now when you look at a casino in a place like Sheboygan, this is not like getting on an airplane and flying to Las Vegas and having a vacation, going to a show, and doing various things and gambling while you're there. This is what you'd call a convenience casino. It's just there. It's convenient for people to get to in their own local community. In other words, it's designed to attract the repetitive problem gambler. Just when you start seeing the other costs show up, the average debt load of people who have a gambling problem, that translates into bankruptcies. It translates into a lot of family problems. When people have maxed out on a credit card, well, they'll come see you in a church because they're having marriage issues or they'll come see you at great marriages to talk about that. That can be as basic as getting the kids to school on time with the right clothing because maybe you don't have the right clothing, can't afford it. When somebody really gets into gambling, it can take over their life very quickly. As I say, this is all independent of the morality of whether or not a person should be gambling. We could talk about that in a church context. When you look at the economic cost, it has a real effect on people's lives, in their families, and then that translates over into a real effect in the community. The demand for social services goes up both for the government and for private organizations, charities, churches. The available revenue to downtown merchants and to the government actually goes down. I spoke recently to the Common Council in Sheboygan and basically said, you need to quantify this very carefully. You need to do some careful studies on this. They had said that they were going to have an economic impact study. Who is going to pay for that study? You're ahead of me there. You get what you pay for. The way it was explained at the Common Council is that the study would not cost the city any money because the promoters of the casino, the tribe would pay for this. As you well know, if you want a data mine and go and look for statistics to prove just about anything, you can do that. It depends on how you ask the question and where you go look for information. If you're going to pay a lot of money, I think the mayor quoted a figure of about a half a million dollars, if you're going to pay a lot of money, you're not going to invest $500,000 to get an answer that you don't like. You're not going to get an answer coming back to say, this is the best thing since sliced bread, except to the extent that that's what you're looking for in an answer and that's what you've paid for. Now, I don't know the promoters of the casino, but I do know from having worked in long-range economic planning for corporations that you ask questions very carefully because you expect certain answers and that's what you pay for. I do know also that when manufacturers look at towns like Sheboygan, look at cities like Sheboygan and say, is this the type of community we want to locate our plant in and make a long-term investment in. There's an impact in terms of whether or not you do have gambling present. So that is one of the topics that people are talking about. Well, it will bring jobs and we are hurting for jobs here in Sheboygan County and have been in the last few years especially. So what about just skating this in and getting those jobs in? One of the questions I have is I was at a rotary meeting earlier and a presenter was from Mayline and he was talking about bringing jobs back to Sheboygan County and they're going to be hiring some more people. Is that going to continue? Are people going to continue bringing jobs to Sheboygan County manufacturing type jobs? You alluded to this earlier. If we have a casino here. It's going to be harder. It's going to be a harder sell to get a manufacturer to locate here. I mean, let's be frank. If I'm sitting here and I'm looking at locating a plant for a manufacturing enterprise and I see a city like Sheboygan, I see some big-time manufacturers. I see companies like Plasco. I see companies like JL French. I see companies like the Kohler companies and Volrath as well as a lot of others. Mayline, for example. When I look at that, I see a certain skill set and I know that I'm dealing with a community where there are families that are in the manufacturing industry. So I'm looking for that kind of person in order to locate a plant. Once I start seeing the skill set evolve more into a service industry, I'm probably going to look elsewhere. And from the family perspective, I find it hard to believe if I've worked a good long career in manufacturing and have raised my family right that I'm sitting there dreaming that when my daughter grows up she's going to be a cocktail waitress or a blackjack dealer. The kind of job I have in mind for him or her son or daughter is not going to be the same kind of job that we would be bringing in with the casino. You spoke before about problem gamblers and I've had people say, well, I just go and I gamble $50 and it's entertainment and then I leave. I'm never going to be a problem gambler. Is it not true that every person who is addicted to gambling, every problem gambler never really thought they were going to be an addict either? They went into a thinking that it was just entertainment and that they would have a handle on it and they were just going to have some fun and walk away. Well, that's true of all addictions. Any problem anybody has, whether it's with a chemical substance or whether it's with behavior, starts innocently enough. People think that they can control the behavior. People think that they can control the behavior in terms of how much they drink or whether they smoke. People think they can control the behavior in terms of whether or not they gamble or view porn or something like that. And they find some, fortunately not all, they find that it can take over their lives very rapidly. And I would suspect that at great marriages you probably see an overrepresentation in problem marriages of some kind of addictive behavior. We do and we've seen couples with one person having a gambling addiction right here in Sheboygan County already without a casino present. And the statistics show that if we have, as you alluded before, a convenience casino, one is right here in our backyard that you can go to on your way home from work or on the weekend very readily as opposed to having it be a destination casino that you have to travel to. That the problem gambling, the instances of problem gamblers and addicts significantly increases when the casino is a convenience casino in a local community. We're always going to have a number of people who have problems with all kinds of behaviors. And the question becomes, do we facilitate that? Do we enable that? And making things very convenient for a problem behavior isn't going to make it any better for the community. What about bringing in tourism dollars? We've heard people say, you know, they're going to bring in tourism dollars. They're going to bring people to Sheboygan. They're going to come to visit us at the casino. Well, Sheboygan already has a lot going for it from a tourism perspective. We've got the lake. We've got all of the festivals that happen around here in the summer. The countryside is beautiful. We've got Road America out in Elkhart Lake that brings a lot of things in. So there are people coming to Sheboygan. The question becomes, are those people who are attracted to the beauty of the community going to keep coming if the character of the community changes? I have to tell you, one of the things that's amazed me about Sheboygan is the quality and quantity of downtown dining options. I mean, you can go downtown Sheboygan and find choices and restaurants that you cannot find in communities easily twice the size. If the discretionary income is taken away from downtown restaurants and starts going to a casino, you get fewer restaurants or ones that aren't quite as nice. And then the people who've come back to Sheboygan year after year when they come to Road America or when they come sailing in Sheboygan or when they come to do something else on our shoreline here are they going to keep that as top of mind as a destination? I think that's a question that we'd have to look at long and hard. Another question was, we bring buses of people into the casino. Buses and buses of people coming to the casino. Doesn't the problem with that become they are bused to the casino and then they spend their money and time at the casino and the casino restaurants, the casino hotel, the casino bars, they don't get out in town and spread the money around because they're bused there. They spend the money there and then they get back on the bus and they leave. Well, that's part of the business model of the casino. They're not going to have buses bring people in to spend money in the casino and then say, oh by the way, please go spend money downtown so that we can be a good neighbor here. This is the basic business model. You want to capture the money, hold on to it and then take whatever profits you get and export them outside of this community. It's not a reinvestment here. And as the executive director of a nonprofit, that would probably have to really up our volunteers to address the growing need if a casino were to come to Sheboygan County. That is one of the things that we've actually talked about internally and we do if that happened and how would we... We already have a waiting list of people coming to us. How would we meet that growing demand? Some of the statistics that we were looking at shows there's a social impact study that shows the likelihood of being a problem gambler is double for a person living within 50 miles of a casino. Well, here it would be even closer. It would be right in our back door. Gamblers are more likely to be on welfare, to be unemployed, to declare bankruptcy, to embezzle from their place of employment, to have synthetism, be arrested or incarcerated. They're also more likely to have poor health, be treated for mental health issues. You see an increase in suicide. They have emotionally harmful family arguments about gambling, divorce increases, use of drug or alcohol increases, and the social cost directly related to human services increases with casinos. Is that your experience? Yes, in a word. I was living in the poorest state in the nation in Mississippi. And one of the things I would have to deal with at a church with people walking in asking for help is people who couldn't get their prescription medication because they'd spent the equivalent of their copay or deductible at the casino. And there's a social cost that I don't know anybody's done a good study on, but a lot of these folks end up in emergency rooms because they no longer have the coverage to go to a doctor or they stop taking their anti-hypertensive and have a stroke. And so there are social costs there. We would actually see people walking in who didn't have their medicine because they'd spent the money on gambling. So I just don't see how that's an upside for the community. What other type of social cost? You mentioned that before, costs to the government and costs to the local nonprofits and charities like churches. What would other costs maybe be to the local governments? Well, the fact of the matter is that your demand for police services goes up quite a bit. Now again, you can look at various studies on crime rates. But the fact of the matter is with the change in the character of the community you see a change in criminal behavior even of the people who were already here who were going to engage in criminal behavior. It's like the old broken window thing from community policing. If there's a vacant house and it's got a broken window in it and nobody fixes it up, the sense of control in the community starts going away. So when New York City re-established control, they focused on the little things first. They focused on dealing with panhandlers and loiterers and scam artists and things like that. And once they re-established that level of control, then the character of the community changed and it suddenly became safe to walk in areas of New York that hadn't been safe 20 years before. Now, the flip side also works. Once you start getting an increased demand for police services, the sense of control starts going away. And then people who might be inclined to do something anyway are going to be more inclined to do something. So it just changes the character of the place. We certainly saw that in terms of the rise in property crimes in Mississippi. One of the things we found was the phenomenon of a 24-hour drive-through pawn shop where people would be at the casino, their card at the ATM wouldn't give them any more cash, so they'd go to the 24-hour Walmart by a big screen TV, take it to the pawn shop, pawn it, and go back to the casino. You know, the average debt of a problem gambler in the United States right now is $157,000. In other words, what people need to understand is that when somebody has a gambling problem, they're carrying an average debt more than people who've gone to graduate school and have college loans beyond graduate school. Excuse me. You know, we steer clear of the moral issues, because we said this isn't the time and place to talk about it. But in a community like Sheboygan where we do have a lot of families and people have grown up here for generations, is that not some type of a consideration as to the change in how our community will change the culture of our community? It certainly is for me. I'd love to talk about that. But without getting into a long argument about theology, I can say that you can't serve the goddess called Lady Luck and also be faithful to whoever you call God, whether you're a Christian, whether you're a Jew, whether you're a Muslim. If you say that you worship God, setting up Lady Luck as your goddess is first of all idolatry and secondly, it's saying that God isn't God and God won't provide for you. And God has not equipped you to provide for yourself. So there are all kinds of moral issues that go with the behavior, but even before you get to the behavior, the motivation is one where you're saying that this somehow random universe has no plan and your faith is telling you that it does have a plan. We look at the fact that every dollar somebody wins at the casino is a dollar their neighbor lost at the casino. And in the meantime, the casino took a portion of it for the handling charge. They're not in the business of giving money away. I mean, if you look at the ads for casinos, they're always acting like you walk in here and you're going to win some money. It goes down in a day if that happened. They're designed to make money. They calculate their odds very well. They control how that happens. And so while there are people who do win money in the overall scheme of things, they're just taking it from somebody else who's gambling. And people will say, well, the casino will give us a couple million dollars a year, though. You know, they're not going to be paying taxes on that property, but they'll give us a couple million dollars. But where did that couple million dollars come from? It came from our citizens and it's going back to us. And in the meantime, they have made tens of millions of dollars because it's a profit-making business and that's why they're in it. Which exports the profits out of Sheboygan. Now, there's another problem in terms of the character of Sheboygan. Suppose we get a casino here and it's not the success everybody thinks it will be. If you look at the documents that are lying before the Common Council now, this would be seating control over a substantial portion of the lakefront to an entity that may enjoy some sovereign immunity from being sued. There's already been one case in Wisconsin where people have tried to sue an Indian tribe about a casino deal gone bad and they find that they can't take them to court because tribes have certain sovereign immunity under the U.S. Constitution. So before we release control over a substantial portion of our lakefront to an entity that we can't control, I think we need to look at that a lot more closely. I think that's a very important subject to end this show on. So thank you so much for being our guest today. Thank you for tuning in to Healthy Marriage. We hope that you'll go to the website to see upcoming programs and events that we have. Remember, marriage, it does matter.