Commentary –

Fairfield County’s Indian Threat

By William A. Collins

Native Americans are not commonly perceived as a threat to public safety here in lush Fairfield County. We bought them off, drove them out, or eradicated them centuries ago. Indeed very few Bridgeporters have ever even seen a Golden Hill Paugussett. Sounds more like some sort of migratory waterfowl.

By now, however, everyone in the Park City knows who the Paugussetts are. Those tiny living shreds of a once-thriving tribe are claiming title to important pieces of both Bridgeport and Shelton. At the moment they’re busy questing for federal certification in order to prosecute their land claims. Their application is momentarily snarled somewhere in the bowels of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in accordance with that agency’s normal Kafkaesque procedures. Meanwhile here at home, most of the world is understandably lined up against them.

But the Bridgeport City Council, of all agencies, has all at once changed its mind. It recently passed a resolution of encouragement. It said, in essence, that if the tribe gains recognition and wants to build a casino, the Council stands ready to talk. Not surprisingly the Paugussetts, like any tribe with its head on straight, aim to get into gambling if they can just reclaim a little swatch of their old homeland. And financing is readily available from the Development Bank of Hades.

The prospect of a casino, however, is decidedly unnerving to the big business wheels elsewhere in this land of civilized hypocrisy. Corporate leaders and their captive newspaper editors foresee only holocaust and desolation. I-95, already a river of molasses, could congeal completely. And our tight labor market could freeze up solid, deterring any further Wall Street multinationals from defecting to Stamford. In short, a casino could mean the end of life as the Gold Coast knows it.

From Bridgeport’s perspective, that might not be all bad. The other towns have rigged their zoning and development plans to create an irresistible gravitational force, pushing their own poor folks relentlessly eastward. None, though, has offered to send along any tax revenue. Consequently Bridgeport’s tax rate, highest in the state, is double that of Norwalk or Stamford, and four times that of Greenwich, Darien, etc.

At the same time, Bridgeport is expected to house, educate, and succor most of the county’s poor. (Even Mother Teresa’s nuns have moved in to help.) Further, the city is also expected, each morning, to ship many of those low-income folk down the coast to do the other towns’ dirty work, at non-union wages.

Hence the dread of a casino. No, silly, not because it would tempt unsuspecting indigents into a degrading life of gambling. After all, these suburban worriers make their own living serving the stock market. No, what they really fear is competition.

Business leaders in these precincts are not stupid. They see that the tribal casinos in New London County pay decent wages and benefits. Such compensation may not seem prodigal to a laid-off submarine machinist, but it could look pretty swell to some underpaid toilers in Fairfield County’s service industry. No doubt if there were decent jobs in Bridgeport, the thinking goes, fewer workers would care to commute to underpaid jobs in Stamford. Scary thought.

From Bridgeport’s vantage point, it is easy to recognize all this regional hypocrisy. Whenever another new office building is announced for Stamford or Norwalk, for example, the press cheers. Forget the added traffic or stress on the labor market. The state may even send grant money. But when a project surfaces that would bring decent unskilled jobs to Bridgeport, the wrath of society descends.

Need we suggest that the preferable way to forestall a casino would be to pay decent wages to everyone now, and to build more affordable housing in every town. Then Bridgeport wouldn’t need gambling.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)