Not only what you said, but every local government salivates over gambling. They get their cut off the top with minimal collection efforts. Gambling is sold as a way to spur development, but, as Atlantic City as exhibit A, this is just a crock of shiite.
Whenever I hear of a locality resorting to gambling to "spur development" I always think of Pottersville in It's a Wonderful Life.
In Illinois they’re so greedy they designed it so that bar owners could only “rent” a machine from a shady group. The cut is 35% of the losses to the bar owner, 5% to the locality, 25% to the state of Illinois and 35% to the “machine operators owners group”. Each machine only costs about 10 - 20K and each one is expected to net about that a year. Some payback, eh?
Funny thing is they got so greedy that a lot of towns are looking at the paltry 5% and saying “no” to gambling. The insiders were shocked.