Casino watch
With voting day only two weeks away, the campaign to bring a casino to Oxford County is heating up. Now that the Las Vegas-based developer Olympia Group has chosen the town of Oxford as the location of its planned $184 million four-season resort, supporters and opponents are racing to reach voters before they go to the polls on Nov. 4. Here’s a rundown of the latest happenings:
-The Olympia Group, which took over the casino push in September, earlier this month picked Oxford as its town of choice for the casino, eyeing several sites there along Route 26, according to a press release from the company. Pat LaMarche, the spokesperson for the campaign, told the Sun Journal in Lewiston that the Oxford Highlands Resort-Spa-Casino would be built on a 40-acre lot, up from the 25 acres originally proposed.
-The Olympia Group also earlier this month released a study done by the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth that said the proposed casino would create 1,277 new jobs during the construction phase and 907 permanent full- and part-time jobs once the casino is built, according to a press release from Olympia. The study projected the casino’s annual revenue would be more than $164 million, with an additional $69 million in gambling revenue paid to the state each year.
-Vote Yes on 2 for Maine, the political action committee backing the casino, outspent its opponent 18-1 between Sept. 15 and Sept. 30, according to the Associated Press. Vote Yes on 2 has spent a little more than $552,000 on television, radio and newspaper ads touting the project, and all of those funds came from the casino’s developer, doing business in Maine as Olympia Gaming Maine LLC. Casinos NO! raised a little more than $77,000, with a good chunk coming from L.L.Bean Chairman Leon Gorman and his family, according to the AP.
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