A couple of New Jersey casino owners are trying to eliminate competition in New York

Only in New York could two New Jersey moguls, Arthur Goldberg and Donald Trump, decide the issue of casino gambling in the state of New York instead of the voters who live there. And racing, which stands to gain if legislation is passed to expand casino gambling in the state, will be a loser if those two have their way.

Goldberg, president and chief executive officer of Park Place, which runs three casinos in Atlantic City and 25 others around the world, struck a deal with the St. Regis Mohawks on May 5, which effectively blocked the construction of a casino at Monticello Raceway by Catskills Development Corp., a company that had a contract with the Mohawks.

The casino at Monticello Raceway, a harness track 85 miles northwest of New York City, was supported by Governor George Pataki and would have helped revitalize the once-vibrant resort area known as the Catskills. As recently as the late 1960s, there were more than 100 major hotels in Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster Counties. Today there are six, and Goldberg has the rights to one of them. For a reported $100-million, Park Place bought a five-year option to purchase the 1,400-acre Kutsher's Resort Hotel and Country Club just outside the village of Monticello. Goldberg promised he would build the Mohawks' casino there within a year.

Who believed him? It took the Mohawks some five years to get the approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the backing of Pataki. The Mohawks spent more than a year redoing an environmental impact study the Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed inadequate.

Now, with a new player in Park Place and a new site, and without Pataki's approval, which was quickly and publicly withdrawn after the Park Place deal, a casino is going to spring to life quickly? In late September, Kevin Gover, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, made it official, saying the Mohawks' casino was specific to that site only. He also pointed out that the Mohawks' deal was the only one approved by the bureau for the entire year anywhere in the country.

Meanwhile, Park Place's Atlantic City casinos will continue to operate without the added competition that would have come from a casino at Monticello Raceway.

Trump has done even better at eliminating the possibility of competition from casinos in New York, even as he has tried to strike his own deal with another Indian tribe for a casino in western New York. He also recently announced that he might build the world's biggest casino in Manhattan.

What he failed to mention was how much money he has already spent lobbying against the establishment of additional casinos in New York. First, he joined forces with the religious right to successfully lobby against passage of a bill by the state Senate that would have allowed casinos on non-Indian lands in New York after it had cleared the state Assembly nearly four years ago. That bill would have directed a percentage of casino revenues to the state's racetracks.

More recently, in addition to the $303,586 Trump reported spending to the Temporary New York State Commission on Lobbying for the first six months of the this year, lawyers for Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts confirmed to the state lobbying commission that Trump had spent at least an additional $118,000 on lobbying and was "intimately involved" in supporting and designing a vitriolic anti-casino campaign by the Institute of Law and Society, which labeled the Mohawks as criminals and blasted Pataki in a series of newspaper and television ads before the Mohawks deal at Monticello Raceway unraveled. The institute also was behind a lawsuit against Pataki for granting the Mohawks approval to their still-operating casino on tribal land in upper northeastern New York.

Why is it in New York's interest to allow casinos in Atlantic City to attract New York gamblers and to allow them to operate with little competition?

Amending the state constitution to allow casinos on non-Indian lands requires passage by two separate sessions of the state Legislature before it can appear on a referendum. That guarantees casinos on non-Indian lands could not appear on a referendum until 2003 at the earliest.

The voters of New York should be given the opportunity to decide the issue of casinos in a state referendum. It should not be controlled by a couple of New Jersey casino owners who only care about their self-interests.