Linn County Could Try Rolling The Dice on a Casino Yet Again
Here we go again.
With sports betting now fully available in Iowa without pre-registering at a casino and bringing huge revenue into the state, local government officials may be betting that now is the time to try another last-ditch attempt to get a casino in Cedar Rapids, even after multiple previous applications were rejected by the Iowa Racing & Gaming Commission.
According to Cedar Rapids Gazette, the last referendum was approved by voters in 2013 but was rejected, twice, most recently in 2017, by state gambling officials who cited a saturated market and said adding Cedar Rapids to the mix would cannibalize revenue from those other casinos. That referendum expires later this year and little has changed on any of those fronts since then, when voters said yes, but gambling officials said no.