Lauren Slavin, Kurt Christian and Derrek Tipton, Herald-Times and Times-Mail Staff Writers
It was the plan that made the most sense, Steve Ferguson remembers.
Now chairman of the board of Cook Group Inc., he was part of the Historic Hotel Preservation Committee that spent months poring over plans to build Indiana’s 11th casino.
Orange County residents and officials saw gambling as the way out of the area’s economic despair. A casino was going to save French Lick and West Baden.
And Donald Trump was going to build it.
In the spring of 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts had a detailed plan to invest more than $100 million into a casino in French Lick. By the end of 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts had filed for bankruptcy.
Trump never built a casino in southern Indiana. The French Lick Casino, as well as the French Lick Resort and West Baden Springs Hotel, have the Cook Group to thank for Orange County’s tourism industry.
Trump visited the Hoosier state this week as a presidential candidate, not the mogul of multiple Indiana casinos. So what went wrong more than a decade ago?
‘What else are we going to do?’
Legislators in Indianapolis battled about the moral repercussions and economic benefits of legalizing casino gambling for years following the implementation of the Hoosier Lottery in 1989.
Gambling was a mostly bipartisan issue, said Mark Kruzan, former Bloomington mayor and an Indiana House representative from 1986 to 2002. Some lawmakers, Kruzan included, expressed concern that crime and gambling addiction would follow in the wake of riverboat casinos.
But those legislators who represented “urban and rural economic deserts,” Kruzan said, saw casino gambling as a means to offset the economic damage of a recession in the early 1980s, and the loss of thousands of industrial jobs.
“I remember legislators for those communities coming to other legislators, lobbying us,” he said. “It was, ‘What else are we going to do?’”