EDITORIAL: Casinos, The Lake Of The Ozarks Community, And How We Got Here

All the buzz in recent weeks about casinos at the Lake has created some confusion. How many casinos? How’d this all get started? And other questions. We heard from a couple of readers with letters to the editor that we've opted to publish, as a glimpse at some of the varying perspectives.

Those are published at the end of this editorial (as well as on our homepage at LakeExpo.com).

But first, a timeline.

Missouri Gambling Timeline

Until 1984, every type of gambling in Missouri was off the table. (That’s not to say it didn’t happen: read our story about Lake of the Ozarks’ first casino, here.)

But that year, horserace betting and the lottery were legalized by voters at the ballot box. Those passed by wide margins: 60% and 70%, respectively.

Then in 1992, the Missouri legislature put in front of voters a change to state statute that would allow casino gambling. Voters approved it, but the State Supreme Court struck it down, saying Missourians would have to change their constitution—not just state statute—if they wanted to allow floating games of chance.

So, in 1994, lawmakers put just such a proposition on the April ballot. It failed by a tiny margin: 0.16% (or, 1,412 votes). They tried again in November. And amid the Republican Revolution in the national election, Missourians decided to legalize floating casinos.

But here’s another way to say it: in 1994, Missourians enshrined into the state constitution a prohibition on casino gambling… unless it was on an excursion riverboat. Just imagine: quaint little jaunts aboard idyllic paddlewheels, with elated women in big hats and men swirling glasses of amber liquid while willing the roulette ball to stop at red. And the number of casinos would be limited, and the whole thing would be regulated by a state gaming commission.

Isn’t that nice?

Well, of course that’s not at all what Missouri ended up with; rather, over the decades, massive casinos have been built exclusively on the shorelines of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers (per state law), and for the most part you’d assume these were just sprawling buildings. Except, they float.

There was no chance a casino could come to Lake of the Ozarks because it was not on the Missouri or Mississippi river; however, there was a caveat. Native American tribes can pretty much do what they want on their lands, and if they go through the right channels, they can lay claim to ancestral lands in places like Lake of the Ozarks.

The Osage Nation made some noises about it in 2002. But the conservative Lake community pushed back, in a big way, and whether for that reason or another, things quieted down.

Then in 2017, Netflix launched what would become a wildly popular, Emmy-award-winning show, Ozark. A main feature of the first few seasons was the main characters’ machinations to change state law and get a riverboat casino business going on the Lake (for the purposes of laundering money). The process in the show is not exactly akin to real-life, but it’s pretty close. And anyways, it illuminates the enormous hurdles that stand in the way of any private investor(s) who would like to acquire land here and open a casino on that land.

The Hurdles:

• The state constitution only permits casinos on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. That would have to be changed, either by legislators putting it on the ballot for Missouri voters, or by the investors gaining enough signatures in an incredibly expensive Citizens Initiative Petition to get it on the ballot for Missouri voters. (Lawmakers feel no constraints over the state constitution when it comes to illegally raising Missourians’ fuel tax, like they did in 2021, but that’s a different article.)

• State law limits the number of casinos allowed in the state, currently, to 13. So a casino would have to close or the law would have to be changed to allow more than 13 casinos (that’s an arbitrary number, but it doesn’t feel arbitrary, does it?). And then the Missouri Gaming Commission would have to go through their process that involves making sure the new casino doesn’t too much compete with other casinos (seriously)

• The casino would have to be floating—either on the river or in a specially built lake near the shoreline. Actually, this one got pretty much fixed in 2021. The legal definition of an excursion gambling boat now includes a non-floating building that has a couple of water tanks inside it. Seriously. Who elected these clowns? So, no floating building; just a building with water tanks in it. That's probably not much of a hurdle.

Back To The Timeline

Then a local group of investors announced in 2020 that they had plans to work on changing the Missouri constitution and to build a casino in the Lake area. The group, Osage River Gaming, insisted their casino was all but inevitable. They supported former State Rep. Rocky Miller’s bill to open up the Osage River for riverboat gambling, but that bill—like so many others—got the 2020 treatment: it never made it through the legislature. Those investors went back to planning, began working with lawmakers on a new bill, and prepared to dig deep (read: $1 million or more) for a Citizen’s Initiative Petition to get the issue directly on the ballot, if necessary.

Then, this fall, the Osage Nation made a sudden and bold announcement about a planned casino about Lake of the Ozarks, where they have already acquired land. They’ll have to go through the federal processes to make the case that this land is not just a little stretch of green earth like the average American possesses, but is actually tribal land that must be considered its own nation. It seems likely they’ll have success with that, and that a casino will indeed come to the Lake.

So here we are: two planned casinos—with some federal hoops to jump through for one, and a daunting process at the state level for the other—and a community all worked up over it. Some love the idea, others hate it, and everyone has their reasons. We heard from two folks, who submitted letters to the editor, and we’re publishing them here. The first is a concerned citizen; the second is one of the investors from Osage River Gaming. Their perspectives are interesting, and are among the many diverse takes we’ve heard about this issue.

Give them a read below, and share your opinion in our reader poll.