'We're going to have crime and prostitution and stealing and people going bankrupt.' Everything you could think of, that was going to happen,' said Sen.

'Everybody just thought everything would go to hell, the people that were against gambling. Opposition, which was strong from some, largely centered on concerns about the effect gambling could have on the state, including gambling addiction and increased crime. 'We had to twist arms and work on amendments and try to appease everyone we could possibly appease, bring in as many chamber (of commerce) people, whoever else would support it.' 'I'll be honest with you, I spent as much time on riverboats (in 19) as I did as chair of the Human Resources Committee, maybe more in the off-session, to try to shepherd that through,' Fey recalled. He said it took four years of 'extensive work' to earn enough support from lawmakers to pass the bill. 'It's a real challenge to try to get a majority vote on a gambling proposal.'įey managed the legislation in the House.

'Pardon the pun, but it's always a crap shoot,' Fey said of passing gambling legislation. Legislators who played central roles in the passage of the riverboat gambling bill in 1989 remember the time vividly and say they still carry some scars from the heated political debate. But it would take state lawmakers four years to pass legislation legalizing riverboat gambling. The interest had been stated, and the groundwork laid. 'Davenport was struggling economically, and we thought it would help their economy.' 'The riverboat gambling concept came from Davenport,' Avenson said. The push for riverboat gambling was particularly strong in Eastern Iowa cities, such as Davenport and Dubuque, which were especially struggling at the time. Tom Fey, a former state legislator from Davenport who now works as a Statehouse lobbyist, remembers people leaving the Quad Cities in such great numbers that the city of Rock Island, Ill., removed some traffic lights and replaced them with stop signs.įey and his fellow state lawmakers, scrambling for ways to spark the state's economy, began considering riverboat gambling in the mid-1980s, a novel concept at the time.īack then, it was a big deal,' said Don Avenson, who was Speaker of the House in the late 1980s and also now lobbies at the Statehouse. Unemployment soared past 9 percent in 1983, more than double what it had been just three years before. In the mid-1980s, Iowa was feeling the full effect of the farm crisis and an exodus of manufacturing jobs.

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