Online gambling

Opponents of the proposed Hard Rock Hotel & Casino at Kansas Speedway say they haven't given up the fight.

 

Americans for Prosperity, a Kansas tax watchdog group that lost an earlier challenge, said this week that it wouldn't appeal that ruling. But it does plan to file another similar lawsuit alleging that the gambling and resort complex in Wyandotte County would unlawfully benefit from tax dollars.

 

The appeal deadline is this week, but Alan Cobb, director of the Kansas chapter of the group, said: "It is our belief that the best option right now is a new lawsuit." He said it could be filed by next week.

 

The first lawsuit was filed in March on behalf of several Wyandotte County taxpayers and funded in part by Cobb's organization. It asserted that the speedway casino plan and two others that were then pending would illegally benefit from their proximity to private land developments that in the past had received state STAR bond funding or, in the speedway's case, was on land obtained through eminent domain or its threat.

 

State law bars any public financing or use of eminent domain for gambling facilities.

 

"I'm not worried about it, and I'm not going to comment on speculative litigation," speedway President Jeff Boerger said Wednesday. "This has been vetted in the Shawnee court, and we're looking forward to moving forward building a Hard Rock casino."

 

Shawnee County District Judge Franklin R. Theis ruled last month that the case was not "ripe" for a judicial decision because the state had yet to select which Wyandotte County casino proposal it deemed best.

 

The case ripened last week when a state panel selected Kansas Speedway and its partners to build a $705 million Hard Rock casino on speedway grounds.

 

But Theis also ruled that long-settled precedent in state law would not bar a casino project from an "association" with another enterprise that "in the past or currently" benefited from such public assistance.

 

Theis cited case law back to 1915 that held state laws must be "construed as applying to conditions that may arise in the future ... unless the intention of the Legislature" is clearly to apply a law retroactively.

 

State Sen. Karin Brownlee said this week that she welcomed further legal action and criticized Theis for dismissing the earlier lawsuit.

 

"I know what the intent was," said the Olathe Republican of the gambling prohibitions in state law. "I wrote the law ... the judge doesn't get it."

 

Brownlee, who said she hadn't read Theis' ruling, said the Legislature's intent was that "casinos are on their own and they are not to benefit from the state bond incentive."

 

"I think it clearly gives an unfair advantage" to a casino project such as the speedway, she said. "They don't have to pay for the land, the infrastructure, the parking lot. It's all been done, and it's all been done with tax dollars.

 

"Those (speedway STAR) bonds are still being paid off," she said. "You don't put a casino there."