Anti-Casino Movement Matures and Sugarhouse Shows Fear

The last few weeks included a particularly upsetting Fishtown Neighborhood Association (FNA) meeting, acknowledgment by Sugarhouse Casino that they view us as a threat and announcement of structure at Casino Free Philadelphia.

The Fishtown Neighborhood Association (FNA) FNA is officially neutral on the subject of Casinos. This is troubling as FNA is the only city recognized organization representing our neighborhood and it is difficult to hav a strong voice if they do not take a stand on the issue. There was strong sentiment at the meeting that newcomers to the neighborhood such as myself and anyone that has been there less than their entire life should not have a say. We’ve started door-to-door outreach as concerned residents to express a stronger voice against Sugarhouse and casinos in general. Early signs are positive: 75% of those we’ve talked to so far have expressed similar sentiments. We need to build community, Fishtown is fractured culturally.

Sugarhouse accused us of voter fraud Thursday’s paper. Casino Free Philadelphia successfully gathered 27,000+ signatures on a petition to add an item to the May ballot that would allow voters to decide if Casinos should be near residential areas. This would push them to the industrial edges of the city. Sugarhouse’s claims are significant but if they truly believed them they wouldn’t call the paper and allege massive fraud, they would just challenge us in court. As far as I’m aware this is the first public sign that Sugarhouse acknowledges us. This is the first step: they consider us a threat. This is a good sign.

The fight will go to court in the next few weeks and will probably be battled down the the last signature. It should be interesting.

We attended Casino Free Philadelphia’s second strategy retreat on Saturday. They announced a structure for an organization, they now have a budget and paid employees. It is still a primarily volunteer organization but Sugarhouse is clearly organizing, we need to do the same. There is clear dedication in the anti-casino movement that didn’t exist even 2 months ago. The movement is serious and we’re motivated.

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About morgan

Morgan is a freelance IT consultant living in Philadelphia. He lives with his girlfriend in an old house in Fishtown that they may never finish renovating. His focus is enterprise Messaging (think email) and Directory. Many of his customers are education, school districts and Universities. He also gets involved with most aspects of enterprise Linux and UNIX (mostly Solaris) administration, Perl, hopefully Ruby, PHP, some Java and C programming. He holds a romantic attachment to software development though he spends most of his time making software work rather than making software. He rides motorcycles both on and off the track, reads literature with vague thoughts of giving up IT to teach English literature.

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