Signs for and against the proposed Richmond Grand casino at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Richmond City, Va., November 7, 2023. Photo by Parker Michels-Boyce
The second time was not the charm for developers’ dreams of building a casino in Richmond, Virginia.
City voters appeared to have decisively rejected the idea in a referendum Tuesday, with more than 60% of votes cast opposing the measure at the time the Richmond Grand Resort & Casino’s backers declared defeat.
Two hours after the polls closed, the Richmond Wins, Vote Yes PAC jointly funded by casino developers Churchill Downs and Urban One conceded defeat in a statement that described their $10 million effort as “a community-centered campaign to create more opportunities for residents of this great city to rise into the middle class.”
“We are grateful to the thousands of Richmonders who voted for good jobs and a stronger city, especially those in Southside who poured their hearts into this project,” the PAC wrote.
Tuesday night’s results presented a far clearer rejection of the casino than a 2021 referendum that saw voters split 51% to 49% against the proposal and represented a blow for Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a vocal cheerleader of the project.
“I will continue to be a voice for communities that have been historically overlooked and underserved,” said Stoney in a statement Tuesday. “I will work for more accessible and affordable child care, for good paying jobs, and for an abundance of opportunities for ALL Richmonders – no matter their zip code or socioeconomic status.”
Virginia’s General Assembly in 2020 allowed five cities around the state to hold referenda on casino gaming. Four of them — Bristol, Danville, Norfolk and Portsmouth — have approved the establishments with little fanfare, but the issue has remained deeply controversial in Richmond. There, debates have emphasized the split among the city’s whiter neighborhoods, which have largely opposed the casino, and those with greater concentrations of Black people, particularly in Southside, which have shown more support for the idea.
Those tensions came to a head Friday when anti-casino group No Means No released a series of audio clips from local radio programs geared toward Black audiences that contained racially inflammatory remarks made by Urban One founder Cathy Hughes, one of the main backers of the project, and other Black casino proponents.
One radio host, who was fired Friday over his comments, accused casino opponent and Jewish lawyer Paul Goldman of being “a white Jew with a background of Judas.” In numerous other clips, Hughes implied that opposition to the casino was driven by racism, repeatedly using an offensive slur to refer to Black people and telling listeners, “Do not forget that they do not see you as a human being.”
This story is republished from Virginia Mercury, a sister publication of Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.?
]]>Radio entrepreneur Cathy Hughes may have upended her push to build a casino in Richmond by letting her opinions fly on the radio.
Just days before Richmonders head to the polls to vote a second time on a proposed casino partly owned by Urban One, the media company Hughes founded, casino opponents published a series of audio clips revealing racially inflammatory remarks made by Hughes and other Black casino proponents on local radio programs geared toward Black audiences.
The clips include numerous examples of Hughes implying that opposition to the casino is driven by racism. At one point, she says, “Do not forget that they do not see you as a human being.”
“Even though you may have a house like theirs, a car like theirs, your children may go to the same schools — they see you as a n*****, alright?” Hughes said. “Wake up!”
In a different recording, local radio personality and occasional political candidate Preston Brown took aim at Richmond activist Paul Goldman, a Jewish lawyer and former aide to Gov. Doug Wilder who has been fighting to block the casino.
“He’s a white Jew with a background of Judas,” Brown said, referring to the biblical figure who betrayed Jesus.
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who supports the casino and has received political contributions from donors tied to the project, denounced the Goldman remark in a social media post Friday.
“I unequivocally condemn the antisemitic remarks made by a guest host on The Box 99.5 FM regarding Paul Goldman,” Stoney said on X. “We must call out hate in all of its forms, and his remarks are completely unacceptable.”
Stoney did not mention any of the other controversial remarks made by Hughes and others, and his office refused to comment further.
In a statement Friday afternoon, Goldman, a former chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, suggested the response and limited apology overlooked “the true meaning of the damage they have done to Richmond.”
“For the love of money, for personal gain, they are willing to turn their casino project into a wedge of division, to attempt to win by a divisive strategy serving only their selfish interests,” Goldman said.
The audio clips, taken from multiple radio shows, were posted on the website of the No Means No anti-casino group. It’s unclear exactly when each comment was made, and the clips don’t show the full context of what preceded and came after each remark. Radio One, the station that aired Brown’s comments, did not immediately respond to a request for the full recordings of the shows from which the clips were taken. At least one of the clips posted by the anti-casino group was edited to condense multiple comments, according to a longer audio file of Brown’s remarks obtained by the Virginia Mercury. However, no one has come forward to dispute the accuracy of what the anti-casino group published.
Radio One, the station that aired Brown’s comment, issued a statement saying Brown was acting as a “temporary guest host” and is not employed by the station.
“These remarks were horrible and offensive,” said Marsha Landess, the station’s regional vice president. “Once we heard the comments and because he was alone in the studio with his producer, I personally drove to the station and immediately removed him from the show.? He will not be appearing again. Our CEO, Alfred Liggins, has personally apologized to Mr. Goldman on behalf of the station and our company.”
Liggins is the son of Hughes. Efforts to reach Brown Friday were unsuccessful.
Landess confirmed that the “primary voices” heard on most of the clips were Hughes and radio host Gary Flowers.
Richmond Wins Vote Yes, the pro-casino PAC funded by Urban One and its business partner Churchill Downs, also distanced itself from the remarks.
“Richmond Wins Vote Yes is about bringing people together to build a better Richmond and provide meaningful economic opportunity for the city and its people,” the PAC said. “This campaign unequivocally condemns the anti-Semitic language and divisive comments that were made on the air.”
Rae Cousins, a Democrat who is running unopposed this November to represent House District 79 where the casino would be located, said in an email that “in reviewing all of the radio snippets that have been released, I absolutely condemn these statements and adamantly stand against all forms of discrimination, hatred and divisiveness.”
“No matter where people stand on this or any political issue, we must agree that these kind of attacks have no place in our community,” she wrote.
The recordings also include sharp criticism by Hughes, Brown and Flowers of Tim Kaine, one of Virginia’s two U.S. senators and previously state governor, mayor of Richmond and a member of the city council. In one clip where Hughes and others discuss the removal of Confederate monuments from Richmond in 2020, the Urban One head said, “Tim Kaine might have wanted one on his front yard.”
Kaine voted against the casino in the 2021 referendum, a decision Hughes appears to have been referencing when she referred to the “damage that he had done.”
“He knows the pain of the Black people of the Southside of Richmond. And yet … he’s saying that it is better for a Black man to get drunk off some beer that he financed, some craft beer in a local brewery, than to have a job. How do you equate that?” she asked.
That comment appears to be in reference to a criticism levied by Brown against the former governor in the longer version of his remarks obtained by the Mercury. In the extended remarks, Brown castigated Kaine for selling beer and wine at a church fundraiser this summer, saying, “He don’t want you to gamble, but he want to sell beer and wine, and it’s OK. You see why I say some people talk out of both sides of their face?”
In yet another clip, Brown noted Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, had disagreed on the casino issue in 2021, with Holton voting in favor of the proposal.
“The Bible said, ‘When two come together and agree,’” he said. “Now how can those two live in the same household and not agree? So how can we have him representing us as a senator when he can’t even keep his own home together?”
Asked about the remarks, Katie Stuntz, a spokesperson for Kaine, said Friday that the senator “is attending a friend’s funeral and is unavailable for comment.”
Virginia’s four other cities allowed to have casinos — Bristol, Danville, Portsmouth and Norfolk — have approved them without much drama.
It’s been a different story in Richmond, where the proposed casino has occasionally inflamed longstanding racial fault lines.
When the casino legalization bill was being discussed in 2020, some Black lawmakers in the General Assembly said they wanted at least some Black ownership of casinos in the industry rather than having Black people simply work in them. Urban One, which describes itself as “the largest local urban radio network” and a “leading voice speaking to Black America,” seemed to fit the bill when the company expressed interest in building a casino in Richmond.
When the project emerged in early 2021, it was described as America’s first and only Black-owned casino and pitched as a way to uplift South Richmond, an area in need of revitalization.
The state capital is overwhelmingly liberal and has had mostly Black political leadership for decades, but stark divides have persisted between the city’s wealthier, whiter areas and working-class Black neighborhoods that often feel left out of the city’s economic development efforts.
When Richmond voters rejected the first casino referendum two years ago, the lower-income minority neighborhoods closest to where the proposed casino would be built strongly supported the project. But opposition was high enough elsewhere in the city that it went down in defeat, sparking some criticism that white Richmond had scuttled a project Black Richmond wanted. Meanwhile, progressive activists who oppose the casino see themselves as fighting predatory gambling interests that drain money from the communities they seek to enter.
The proposed Richmond Grand Resort? and Casino on the ballot this year promises to create 1,300 jobs and generate $30 million in annual tax revenue. The “Black-owned” marketing has been largely dropped this year because Urban One is now pursuing the casino as a joint project with Churchill Downs, the horse racing and gambling enterprise that bought Virginia’s Colonial Downs racetrack last year.
The vote on this year’s casino referendum is expected to be close, but it wasn’t immediately clear Friday what impact the disclosure of the audio clips might have on the vote.
While Hughes in one recording released by casino opponents insisted the issue “is not about the color of a person’s skin,” other clips reveal her repeatedly casting the casino debate in racial terms.
In one clip, she characterizes Black opponents of the casino and Black supporters as, respectively, “house n****** and field n******.” In another, she says, “We have got to connect our Black middle class with our Black downtrodden and realize that we are one and the same in the eyes of white folks. White folks do not care.”
Hughes and Flowers specifically called out two casino opponents, marijuana legalization and civil rights advocate Chelsea Higgs Wise and former City Council candidate Allan-Charles Chipman, in one segment.
“These are not white folk pulling up signs and flying planes around the city,” said Flowers. “They’re paying for it, but they’ve hired Black people to do that — self-hating Black people.”
Chipman hit back on X after the recordings were circulated, writing, “I am not a self-hating Black person as they called me. I am an exploitation-hating Black man that firmly believes Dr. King is right when he said ‘Racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are all tied together. You can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other.’”
With Nov. 7 looming, the clips make it clear that even the casino’s backers are unsure of what will happen Tuesday.
“I spent $10 million is what the final bill looks like to keep it in Richmond. Such a waste. I am so mad at this opposition,” said Hughes in one recording. “Do you know how much good I could have done with $10 million that I had to pay to lawyers and accountants and lobbyists and make contributions to everybody I thought could influence?”
This story has been updated to include comments from Rae Cousins.
]]>Wise County, Virginia. (Sarah Vogelsong/Virginia Mercury)
A public-private initiative that aims to test out emerging energy technologies on Southwest Virginia lands formerly mined for coal has signed an agreement to develop its projects on 65,000 acres primarily located in Wise County that are owned by a major natural gas and pipeline company.
The deal, announced by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office Wednesday, will give the Energy DELTA Lab access to a large tract of formerly mined lands owned by Texas-based company Energy Transfer and managed by its subsidiary, Penn Virginia Operating Company.
Short for Discovery, Education, Learning & Technology Accelerator, the DELTA Lab has for several years been a priority for regional and state leaders eager to both keep a flourishing energy industry in Virginia’s coalfields and diversify an economy that for decades was dependent on coal.
Crafted as a partnership between regional business development group InvestSWVA, the Virginia Department of Energy, the Southwest Virginia Energy Research and Development Authority and energy and utility companies, the DELTA Lab proposes to use the abundant lands and existing infrastructure of Southwest Virginia as test sites for new wind, solar, nuclear, battery and pumped storage, hydrogen and other emerging energy technologies.
The Youngkin administration said Wednesday that “more than a dozen projects” under consideration by the initiative represent over $8.25 billion in potential private investment, 1,650 new “high-paying” jobs and nearly a gigawatt of new power generation.
“Repurposing former mined lands in Southwest Virginia for development will allow us to create sites where energy demand and generation can co-locate, leading to more opportunities to grow Virginia’s economy,” said Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick in a statement.
Wise County Administrator Mike Hatfield said in the same release that because large portions of Wise have been difficult to develop, “given limited access due to private and federal ownership,” the new agreement “will create game changing opportunities that simply did not exist before.”
Energy Transfer, which owns both the surface and mineral rights of the land that will be used by DELTA Lab, manages roughly 675,000 acres of land in West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Virginia through Penn Virginia Operating Co.
Tarah Kesterson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Energy, said there is only one coal mining permit associated with the 65,000 acres, for A&G Coal Corporation’s Meg-Lynn Mill Branch Mine. That operation is no longer actively mining, and the department is waiting for the bond to be released following cleanup, she said.
This story is republished from the Virginia Mercury, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
]]>Coal was loaded in Cumberland in Harlan County in 2019. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Central Appalachian coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia are more than eight times more likely than men in the general population to die from respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and black lung, according to recent research.
“This higher mortality has also worsened over time with modern miners facing greater risk than their predecessors,” wrote two of the researchers, Kirsten Almberg and Robert Cohen of the University of Illinois Chicago, in a report on the findings published Monday. “Miners in the Central Appalachian states of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia face the most severe risk.”
The study was conducted jointly by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It looked at 235,550 deceased miners and is described as “the largest study of its kind to date.”
While rates of black lung, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis? — an incurable disease caused by the inhalation of coal dust — fell in the U.S. between 1968 and 2006, cases of the most severe form of the disease, known as progressive massive fibrosis, have risen over the past two decades in Central Appalachia.
“This advanced form of (black lung) has recently been found in Central Appalachia at rates not seen since the early 1970s,” wrote the Congressional Research Service in a 2019 report. “In 2017 researchers discovered, among coal miners mostly living in Kentucky and Virginia and served by three federally funded Black Lung Clinics in Virginia, what may be the largest cluster of (progressive massive fibrosis) ever recorded.”
The University of Illinois Chicago-NIOSH study also found coal miners, and particularly those exposed to silica dust, had significantly increased odds of dying of lung cancer compared with the general U.S. population.
Central Appalachian underground mines have been found to have more silica dust on average than mines elsewhere in the U.S.
Current U.S. standards allow coal miners to be exposed to double the level of silica as other workers, although the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration is in the process of tightening those rules.
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