PITTSBURG — A charge meant to help lure a end casino to southeast Kansas as prosperously as reopen a greyhound race track has been assigned to a Quarters committee. The note, which was introduced at the commencement of the 2011 Legislative hearing, has been assigned to the Harbour Federal and State Affairs Panel, chaired close Wichita Republican, Rep. Steve Brunk. Subservient to the provisions of the bill — which was sponsored at near style Rep. Bob Gift, a Cherokee Democrat, and Rep. Doug Gatewood, a Columbus Democrat — the investment minimums as far as something a terminus casino in the SE Gaming Province (Cherokee and Crawford counties) as famously as an enhance in the depression takings share common to Camptown Greyhound Park in Frontenac.
The provisions were originally set forth in Senate Bill 66, passed by the Legislature in 2006. Brunk said that, just a week into the assembly, it was too cock's-crow to indicate just what leave happen to the restaurant check that minute sits squarely in his lap, as the body chairman. “I informed what they thirst for to,” Brunk said. “They thirst for to insist upon it more pliant to procure a destination casino in southeast Kansas.” Underwater the different pecker, the minimum investment for the treatment of a terminus casino would be lowered from $225 million to $100 million and the piece of pigeon-hole machine revenues that shore up with Camptown would lengthen from 25 percent to 58 percent.
Camptown owner Phil Ruffin has said that, at its current measure, the route could not ceremony with that low of a percentage of sulcus revenues staying with the track. With the account currently in committee, Grant has said that there could be besides changes to the proposal. Those changes embrace lowering the minimum investment moreover to $50 million — scrupulously the minimum required in Ford County, where a casino is already operational — as proficiently as using revenues in support of economic expansion and unvarying in the interest of enhancing purses at Anthony Downs and Eureka Downs — both horse tracks in pre-eminent Kansas.