By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
About a third of the money the city of St. Joseph uses to buy cars and trucks as well as help finance various non-profits has been lost due to flooding.
St. Joseph City Manager Bruce Woody estimates the city will receive only about a third of the $900,000 in gambling revenue it gets annually from the operation of the St. Jo Frontier Casino. Woody has been trying to gauge the impact of the loss.
“We’re right at the tail end of the current fiscal year which ends June 30th,” Woody tells Barry Birr, host of the KFEQ Hotline. “And we’re budgeting right now, working on our budget for next year, 2020. I’m estimating between the end of this year, plus losses into next year, about $350,000 worth – I’m trying to be conservative – worth of lost revenue.”
Flooding from the Missouri River swamped the St. Jo Frontier Casino complex in mid-March, forcing it to close for 31 days. The casino, both slots and table games, re-opened Saturday. The land-based portion of the complex, which houses the bar, buffet, and ballroom, remains under reconstruction. The casino, which floats on a moat of Missouri River water, survived relatively unscathed. The land-based portion was heavily damaged.
Woody says the city receives approximately $75,000 each month in gambling revenue. In April, the check dropped to $47,000 as the city absorbed the first losses from the closing of the casino.
Though the casino re-opened this weekend, it likely will only be operating at three-quarters of its capacity Woody estimates.
The two largest sources of discretionary spending for the city are the gambling fund and the cell phone fund. The money is used for capital expenses, in particular purchasing cars and trucks. Woody says it not only helps finance festivals; it contributes to the budgets of several non-profit agencies.
“Like the Innovation Stockyard and Allied Arts and several others, MOKAN, etc.,” according to Woody. “So, I’m going through a process right now to figure out how we can scale back, still be as fair as we can to those partners that we want to support, but realize that we also have to cover our own bills at a time when we have revenue shortfalls.”