Park City casino clears Senate vote ....Will this Help the Area?

i was reading this and I thought I would share it with you! I was wondering what you thought about a Casino in your neighborhood? Does it really help you out? or just made to sound like it will?

thanks

Ray DeLao

With Waukegan state Sen. Terry Link saying Illinois needs to stop losing gamblers to Wisconsin and his Chicago counterparts saying the same about northwest Indiana, the Illinois Senate voted 30-27 on Tuesday to approve a gaming expansion that includes a casino license for Park City.

The vote came one day after the Illinois House approved the same measure, and Tuesday's late-afternoon vote in the Senate sends the measure to Gov. Pat Quinn, who has expressed reservations about the large scale of the plan.

"It goes to the governor's desk if you vote for it today," Link said from the Senate floor as he wrapped up more than an hour of debate around 5:20 p.m. "And there's going to be a lot of people calling the governor's office (asking) him to sign this bill immediately, because this is about jobs and revenue."

Link added that he hopes work on the new casinos - including Chicago, Rockford and a south Cook County suburb to be determined - "will start immediately upon the authorization of this bill." He estimated the new casinos could be open within two years.

If Quinn, who has the power of a line-item veto, approves the entire package or the portion that awards a license to Park City, it would be the first gaming establishment in Lake County since the state legalized riverboat gambling in 1990.

After attempts to land a license for Waukegan failed in the 1990s and again in the early- to mid-2000s, Park City became the focus of renewed efforts in 2009. In 2010, the City Council approved a pre-development agreement with the private Park City Gaming Inc. to explore possible sites for a casino.

Link said Tuesday that he feels expanded gaming would "help the entire state of Illinois," in part by keeping bus groups from heading to out-of-state casinos.

"I speak at a lot of senior citizens groups," Link said, "and one of the first questions they ask me is ‘When are we going to open a casino (in Lake County)?' ... In my area, they're catching a bus up to Potawatomi, (and) they're not going up there half-full either. They're going up there with our tax dollars, and we've got to stop that flow."