From: [redacted], counsel, Attorney General's office
To: [redacted], Executive Chamber
Hey [redacted], hope all is well. Our guys took another pass through the language of the gaming-expansion referendum and developed a new draft.
Here goes:
"The proposed amendment to section 9 of article 1 of the Constitution would allow the Legislature to authorize up to seven casinos in New York state for the legislated purposes of promoting job growth, increasing aid to schools, and permitting local governments to lower property taxes through revenues generated. Shall the amendment be approved?"
I know what you're thinking: Yes, this includes significant changes from the version the Legislature and Executive wanted. But our staff's considered opinion is that the original draft simply won't pass muster with the Board of Elections.
Since I know there will be disappointed faces in your shop, we want to explain some of our concerns one by one.
• The gerunds "promoting," "increasing" and "permitting" are about as warm and positive as we can get without tipping the balance to flat-out promotion. We know you had your heart set on "championing," "perfecting" and "assuring the blessings of."
• While we don't want to wander back into an issue that's been debated for several weeks: We completely understand your argument that revenues going to municipalities from new casinos could reasonably be expected to fund facilities such as animal shelters. Even so, the response wording cannot read "YES, I care about puppies"/"NO, I hate puppies."
• For the same reason, we strongly advise against any of the alternative response lines that you've offered, including "YES, the whole state should thrive"/"NO, I'm comfortable with upstate degenerating into 'The Road Warrior' without Australian accents."
• Similarly, it is improper to include a line below the "NO" response that reads "Are you absolutely sure you've thought this thing through?"
• Your original version includes a box reading, "Bring a copy of your voter registration form to any future upstate casino resort and receive a FREE $50 poker chip and mouth-watering steak dinner!" While we agree that asking Steve Wynn to sponsor this offer is, as you put it, "a unique and historic public-private partnership," state and federal law expressly prohibits such inducements. And no, you can't fix it simply by cutting out "mouth-watering."
If we may depart from the strictly legal reasons for these changes and venture into some of the more practical political justifications for our edits — not that we would ever in a million years presume to lecture the Executive branch on such things — we believe there's a real likelihood that New Yorkers who find themselves on the fence about the expansion of table gaming in the state will be sufficiently incensed by overcooked ballot language that they'll vote no out of the suspicion they're being (to borrow a gambling term) hustled.
It's not as if we're touting the same sort of best-case-scenario outcomes in any of the five other referenda on the ballot this year. Proposal Three, for example, amends the Constitution to "extend for 10 years ... the authority of counties, cities, towns and villages to exclude from their constitutional debt limits indebtedness contracted for the construction or reconstruction of sewage facilities."
And that's it. We didn't add on " ... for the legislative purpose of preventing a sewage apocalypse" or some-such.
We tend to let voters figure these things out for themselves.
All the best, [redacted]
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619