Casino plan sharply limits public deliberation.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Arnold Buchman For The Register-Guard

From their offices 65 miles away, The Register-Guard's editors counsel the city of Florence and its taxpayers to `recognize reality' and reach a city services agreement with the operators of the Three Rivers Casino (editorial, Aug. 4).

This advice was prompted by Mayor Phil Brubaker's surprise action at the City Council meeting Aug. 1 in obtaining authority to negotiate for the hookup of city services to the casino's 100-acre site, which borders Florence on the east. The Brubaker plan would present a negotiated agreement for council approval at its September meeting. Assuming council approval, Brubaker indicates he would seek voter ratification on the November ballot.

The Register-Guard presumably is speaking about today's reality - an arguably non-invasive, temporary casino-in-a-tent. But what about tomorrow's reality?

In a presentation to the council that set the stage for Brubaker's proposal, casino operators claimed not to need the hookup, but would do so to benefit the city. This disclaimer notwithstanding, it is arguable that a lack of city services has been a nagging impediment to the advertised site expansion to include a 100-room hotel, 50,000 square feet of gambling floor, ancillary restaurants and shops, as well as possible condominiums and unspecified commercial development.

The Brubaker proposal gives the casino operators the great advantage of focusing public attention on a narrow, benign question: Should the city sell presumably excess sewer capacity? The proposal evades the far more critical issue of what facilitating development of the casino-based `destination resort' complex will mean for Florence and its capacity to provide municipal services to its residents and taxpayers.

Ordinarily, these concerns would be dealt with through established planning procedures: system development fees, land use restrictions, business licensing requirements and environmental safeguards. But - as the residents of Coastal Highlands, a subdivision bordering the casino site on the Florence side of the line, woke one morning a year ago to find - casino operators enjoy immunity from all such state and county rules, regulations and procedures - as well as local taxes and civil lawsuits.

Consequently, this is not a simple matter of selling a sewer hookup, as Mayor Brubaker would have us believe. Digging the Brubaker sewer to the casino site can have profound and irreversible ramifications for the future.

Florence could wake up one morning to find a dominating consumer of city services, untaxed and beyond the reach of local rules, the nature, scope and pace of the expansion of which is totally at the whim and control of the uncontrolled casino operators.

It may be that this will happen anyway. It may be that the voters would view this as positive. Nevertheless, Florence residents and taxpayers should have, at least, an understanding of all that's at stake.

But, according to the city's administrators, none of the usual staff study to guide council members and the public was done in preparation for the council vote to negotiate an agreement. Although supporters of Brubaker's proposal obviously had been lined up to speak in favor of the plan's specifics, the mayor's action came out of the blue for people who, had they known, could not have been similarly counted on to join in the applause.

In two short months from now, when mail balloting begins, Florence voters could be asked to decide a question that, despite its apparent mundane simplicity, might set the course of the city's future. Over these next few weeks, will Florence taxpayers and homeowners have the benefit of careful city staff analysis of the potentially far-reaching ramifications involved? Will there be a focused debate of the broader public policy implications?

From the staging of the Aug. 1 meeting and the tightness of the timetable he has set, Brubaker appears to prefer that kind of consideration be avoided.

Instead, it appears that any concerned voters who will want to make a considered judgment as to whether and how their city's future will be affected will be left to scramble over the next few, short weeks to educate themselves.

Or, as one suspects Mayor Brubaker and the casino operators may be hoping, the sale of a sewer hookup will be the only question talked about, and the serious implications of the projected government-to-government services agreement will slide by unnoticed on a combination of unawareness and apathy.

Arnold Buchman of Florence is a long-time critic of casino development.