The New York Post might ponder the words of a New York City Bettor who came to Nassau OTB and declared he should have been coming there years ago. Makes you wonder that...?
Doubling down on a bad bet
Last Updated: 12:00 AM, June 25, 2012
Posted: June 25, 2012
Print In other Albany news, New York City was incorporated into the Catskill Mountains last week — at least under the terms of a bill that slithered through the Legislature with little notice.
The measure revives off-track betting in the city by “extend[ing] the Catskill [OTB] region” to cover the city’s five boroughs.
This is geographically bizarre, of course.
But it is functionally corrupt as well — an effort to reanimate the only bookie shop in the history of horse-racing to lose money every time it opened its doors.
Honest folks thought OTB had been sent to its reward in 2010. So why on earth bring it back now?
Sponsors call this a “jobs bill” — and promise it will “get people back to work.”
Which doubtless it will, if by “back to work” they mean put back on a semi-show patronage payroll with public-employee salaries and benefits so costly that they drove OTB into bankruptcy virtually all by themselves.
Indeed, the legislation gives hiring preference to former OTB employees, all of them once-upon-a-time municipal union members now in need of a paycheck.
But taxpayers are most definitely not in need of another hand in their pockets.
Yet that’s what they’ll have if Gov. Cuomo — now taking his usual post-legislative victory laps — acquiesces in the resuscitation of OTB.
The governor’s comfortably staffed press office refused to entertain questions about the bill’s future — an increasingly common practice — so observers are left only to guess at Cuomo’s intentions.
Will he do the right thing: Kill the bill?
Or will he — has he — become party to the corrupt bargain it represents?
OTB earned its execution.
Cuomo should leave it at that.
The measure revives off-track betting in the city by “extend[ing] the Catskill [OTB] region” to cover the city’s five boroughs.
This is geographically bizarre, of course.
But it is functionally corrupt as well — an effort to reanimate the only bookie shop in the history of horse-racing to lose money every time it opened its doors.
Honest folks thought OTB had been sent to its reward in 2010. So why on earth bring it back now?
Which doubtless it will, if by “back to work” they mean put back on a semi-show patronage payroll with public-employee salaries and benefits so costly that they drove OTB into bankruptcy virtually all by themselves.
Indeed, the legislation gives hiring preference to former OTB employees, all of them once-upon-a-time municipal union members now in need of a paycheck.
But taxpayers are most definitely not in need of another hand in their pockets.
Yet that’s what they’ll have if Gov. Cuomo — now taking his usual post-legislative victory laps — acquiesces in the resuscitation of OTB.
The governor’s comfortably staffed press office refused to entertain questions about the bill’s future — an increasingly common practice — so observers are left only to guess at Cuomo’s intentions.
Will he do the right thing: Kill the bill?
Or will he — has he — become party to the corrupt bargain it represents?
OTB earned its execution.
Cuomo should leave it at that.
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