Posted on Tue, Aug. 31, 2010
GETTYSBURG – Nearly 150 years ago, with Confederate troops upon them, Gettysburg citizens united in their support of the Union cause.
Today a decidedly uncivil war over a proposed casino a half-mile outside the boundaries of the Gettysburg National Military Park has divided this historic community.
Since the casino plan – the second in five years – was unveiled in December, battle lines have hardened and deepened, pitting neighbors, businesses, preservationists, and veterans against one another as the debate has gained national attention.
A showdown is expected Tuesday in a small conference room at a Comfort Inn several hundred yards from where President Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address in 1863. Nearly 400 people – a record number for a Pennsylvania gaming hearing – are scheduled to testify on whether gambling belongs near one of the nation’s first “hallowed” grounds.
The debate over the future of Gettysburg, where 8,000 died during the historic battle in 1863, comes as a war of words rages across the globe over whether an Islamic center should be built several blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York.
The issues in both are linked to the question of “sacred ground,” what defines it and what constitutes its desecration.
“Gettysburg will always be caught in that tension between commercialism and veneration,” said Edward Linenthal, professor at Indiana University and author of Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields, which features a section on Gettysburg. “This is the latest chapter, not the last, in an ongoing conversation.”
The casino proposal – put forth by David LeVan, a former Conrail president and Philadelphia school board member – would put slot machines and table games in a foundering conference center and hotel on Emmitsburg Road, a half-mile from the boundary of Gettysburg National Military Park and two miles from the Mason-Dixon Line.
LeVan – who lives across the street from the park’s visitors center and has personally invested $4 million in the Gettysburg battlefield and other local preservation projects – failed in his first attempt in 2005 to win a license for a larger casino at a different site farther from the battlefield.
Now LeVan and other investors, including former state representative and Chester Downs ex-president Joseph Lashinger Jr., are vying with three other bidders seeking the last of two “resort” licenses. (The first was awarded to the planned casino at the Valley Forge convention center).
A resort license allows only 600 slot machines, compared with 3,000 at other locations, and 50 table games.
The seven-member Gaming Control Board, which considers local support, economic and overall impact, and the financial suitability of the owners, said it would make its decision by the end of the year, officials said.
LeVan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said his $75 million Mason-Dixon Resort & Casino project would rescue a struggling, 35-year-old conference center, save existing jobs, and create hundreds of new ones.
“We have tremendous amount of local support and our location, two miles north of the Maryland border, is the last untapped gaming marketplace in Pennsylvania,” said Mason-Dixon spokesman David LaTorre.
Supporters say the casino would help boost business in the historic downtown and bring tax revenue to Adams County, where no taxes are levied on some large parcels, such as the 6,000-acre national park, and where unemployment stands at 8 percent, double what it was here five years ago.
The Civil War Preservation Trust, considered the nation’s leading battlefield-preservation group, issued an economic study critical of the casino last week, saying Mason-Dixon greatly exaggerated the number and type of jobs that would be created. It argued that the casino would siphon revenue from existing businesses.
It has been joined in opposition to the proposed casino by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other organizations.
But the oldest Gettysburg preservation group, Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, has thrown its support behind the project.
Board president and Gettysburg resident Brendan Synnamon said last week that his board – which has received financial support in the past from LeVan – studied the proposal and concluded that it would help the battlefield, not hurt it.
“Preservation doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” said Synnamon, whose organization has helped fund the preservation of one-third of the battlefield since its founding in 1959. “We need a healthy economy.”
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