While anti-casino forces in the city were trying to put the casino genie back in the bottle, FACT regarded (accurately, it turned out) slots as an inevitable reality and believed that SugarHouse eventually would build its gambling mecca on the Fishtown riverfront.
FACT figured that if it didn't extract promises from SugarHouse before construction began, it would have no leverage to get anything for the neighborhood afterward.
Smart thinking.
Too bad that it took 11th-hour anticipation of the SugarHouse groundbreaking to wake O'Brien to the fact that - hey! didja hear? - there was community money to be had in gambling.
In the past week, O'Brien floated an amendment to the state's gaming laws that basically asks for the kind of money and special-services districts that FACT nailed down tight nearly a year ago. Farnese, initially, sure didn't seem to mind.
Problem is, the amendment could a) divert elsewhere the money that FACT worked so hard to score from SugarHouse, and b) add a dangerously Fumo-esque layer of politics over how the money is doled out.
Both O'Brien and Farnese have tinkered in recent days with the amendment's language, in response to backlash that they would've known was coming if they'd kept in closer touch with FACT members (whose pro-Fishtown-casino stance appears to have negated their status as constituents worthy of attention from these guys in the first place).
"It's disgusting," seethes Maggie O'Brien (no relation to Mike), a FACT founder. She says that her group, collectively, spent thousands of man-hours and gallons of sweat meeting with SugarHouse while anti-casino forces kept their heads in the sand.
