GAMBLING OPPONENTS FIGHTING APATHY

Leaders of a group hoping to keep riverboat gambling out of Cape Girardeau warned against complacency Thursday in kicking off their second election campaign drive of the year.

"It seems to be a different feeling out there than it was in June," City Councilman Melvin Gateley told an assemblage of about 45 people at the First Presbyterian Church.

Cape Girardeau voters rejected riverboat gambling last June by a margin of 53-47 percent, with 54 percent of the city's registered voters going to the polls. The turnout was strong for a single-issue election.

But proponents, who admit that overconfidence may have hurt them, quickly gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot.

This time out, they are targeting student voters, who were not in school at the time of the June election, and will try to get more of the city's gambling advocates to the polls.

Citizens Against Riverboat Gambling, which is using the motto "We Love Cape" this time, also is concentrating on getting out the vote. There is concern, however, that anti-gambling voters almost feel as if they lost that election, since the issue is back before the electorate so quickly.

"We have had to battle apathy in those people who voted `no' the first time," said Andy Pratt, a minister at the Baptist Student Center at Southeast Missouri State University.

"It's kind of ironic. We won but everybody's discouraged," he said.

He contends that defeating riverboat gambling this time may finally kill it locally because so many more riverboats will be in operation in St. Louis and Caruthersville, particularly by the time the initiative could be brought back for a vote a year later.

By then, the economic issues surrounding riverboat gambling should be clearer, he said. Right now, he said, "everybody's kind of speculating, stabbing in the dark."

Pratt, who teaches a religion class at the university, is involved with Students Against Riverboat Gambling, which formed to counteract the proponents' attempt to enlist student voters.

The university's Student Government Association has scheduled a forum on the issue on Oct. 19.

Thursday's meeting was for "community action chairpersons," who will be conducting a door-to-door "blitz" that will attempt to contact all 19,000 of the city's registered voters on Oct. 23.

Among those in the group were a woman in a Cub Scout den mother uniform, a man in work clothes, numerous retirees, Capt. Elmer Trapp of the Salvation Army and former Southeast Missourian editor John Blue.

Campaign information lists all members by their church affiliation. Gateley exhorted them to return to their congregations with the anti-gambling information.

"We have a natural audience that way," he later explained.

At a press conference before the campaign meeting, the Rev. Charles Grant of the First Presbyterian Church read a statement attacking the type of entertainment that gambling provides pointing to a recent performance by a "California Playgirl Centerfold all-male dance revue" at the Players Casino in Metropolis, Ill. and the supposed economic incentives.

He pointed out that little of the money spent to bring gambling to Cape Girardeau has been spent by its citizens. "If gambling is such a promising economic opportunity, why haven't we seen any local investors stepping up and putting their money down?" Grant asked.

Organizers handed out more than 220 signs at the meeting. Treasurer Paul Stehr said the group currently has about $1,500 to finance the campaign, which he said is "not what we need."

In the June election, the Las Vegas-based Boyd Group spent some $163,000 trying to convince Cape Girardeau voters to accept riverboat gambling. The company, which had proposed spending $37 million to develop a gambling enterprise on the city's waterfront, so far has been invisible in this latest election campaign.