Council members voted 4-1 to rezone 175 acres of farmland near Interstate 80 Exit 126 for commercial use after a negative Oct. 1 Planning Commission recommendation and a two-hour public hearing featuring more opponents than supporters.

All of the City Hall council chamber’s 100-some chairs were filled, with other attendees listening from the hallway. A Zoom livestream also quickly reached its capacity of 100 viewers under the city’s arrangement for the evening.

Tuesday’s vote keeps Elite Casino Resorts on track to open the Lake Mac Casino Resort — named for nearby Lake McConaughy — and Hastings racing license holder Brian Becker’s quarter horse track next Labor Day, said Sharon Haselhoff, the Iowa firm’s regional vice president and general manager.

The Nebraska Racing and Gaming Commission voted 7-0 July 19 to let Becker use his one-time legal option to transfer his Hastings racing license to Ogallala.

The racino site, just west of Walmart in the I-80 exit’s southwest quadrant, sits amid the sprawling 1874-84 staging area where cowboys waited to load millions of head of Texas longhorns into Union Pacific cattle cars at the “End of the Texas Trail.”

The herds spawned a raucous “Wild West” decade yet celebrated in Ogallala, where Front Street memorializes the old Crystal Palace and Cowboy’s Rest saloons that drew cowhands with fresh pay seeking female companionship and gambling sometimes capped by gunfire and fresh graves on nearby Boot Hill.

Rockies citedOgallala council members voted to suspend the usual requirement of three “yes” votes on most ordinances before they adopted the ordinance rezoning Denver resident Arden Krugerud’s farmland from A-1 agricultural to C-4 “interstate highway business district.”

Both votes were identical, with President Steven Krajewski and Councilmen Kevin Block, Dustin Holstein and Chris Laflan voting in favor. Krajewski is de facto mayor in Ogallala’s council-manager form of city government.

Darryl Weddington, the council’s vice president and senior member, cast the lone “no” vote both times.

Local backers said Ogallala’s ability to grow economically depends on welcoming major employers. Former state Sen. Ken Schilz added that the city must get its population back over 5,000 by 2030 to remain a “city of the first class” and keep getting the extra state aid that status provides.

“Is Ogallala open for business?” said Schilz, who has worked for three years on the racino effort. “Are you willing to grow to the next level that we need?”

Approval “represents a significant step in enhancing our community’s economic landscape,” added Mary Wilson, executive director of Keith County Area Development.

Many opponents Tuesday cited the racino’s potential social costs, adding that a majority of Keith County voters voted “no” on the 2020 initiatives.

Two others said they have firsthand experience of how legalized gambling has had a hollowing-out economic effect on casino towns like Deadwood, South Dakota, and Central City and Black Hawk in the Colorado Rockies.

James Parrish said he grew up in Deadwood after the 1870s gold boomtown legalized casinos in 1989. Many regular businesses closed, others put in slot machines to survive, and many longtime residents had to sell their homes because they couldn’t afford their property taxes, he said.

“Gaming is bad for surrounding industries,” Parrish said. “Most jobs created are low-skill, low-wage.”

Fellow Ogallala resident Ramona Upright said she and her husband “watched Central City and Black Hawk be destroyed” from their former Idaho Springs home near the twin towns after casinos were approved there.

“Now the place is casinos,” she said. “There’s nothing left.”

Council members who backed the rezoning said the growth patterns at Ogallala’s I-80 exit back commercial zoning regardless of whether the resort goes forward.

“I’m putting blinders on regarding the casino,” Krajewski said. “Elite does not have approval to build a casino from the city. … The zoning is the easy part.”

Councilman Kevin Block said Elite could have left its site’s agricultural zoning alone and applied for approval of the casino as a “special use.”

“If I say ‘no’ to this, how can I say anything but ‘no’ to anything else?” Block said.

But Weddington said he couldn’t ignore warnings from Ogallala ministers and worries from other residents that moral damage from increased gambling addictions and broken families typically follow casinos to small towns and cities.

“If we’re Christians on this council, how can we ignore this huge outcry we’re getting from a large percentage of the population who live in this town, especially around where this is going to go?” Weddington said.

Legal steps remainingPlanning Commission members, who serve in an advisory capacity to the council, had favored the racino at a Sept. 3 meeting. But an error in that meeting’s legal notice led the panel to start over “from an abundance of caution,” Krajewski told the audience Tuesday.

With about 40 people on hand for its second hearing Oct. 1, the planning panel voted 5-3 against recommending approval of the rezoning.

Ogallala, one of several Nebraska cities to pursue racinos after statewide voters legalized them in 2020, became the leading candidate on the basis of a favorable December 2023 market study ordered by the Legislature.

It said allowing an Ogallala racino and horse track would be the most favorable economically to Nebraska’s six current holders of racing licenses. Tracks in Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island and Columbus now all have permanent or temporary casinos, and one remains in the works in South Sioux City.

After initially voting in 2021 to explore a plan by Minnesota-based Canterbury Park, the City Council and Keith County Board both voted in 2022 to support Elite Casino Resorts’ interest. The firm also owns Fonner Park’s Grand Island Casino Resort, an expansion of which is expected to open early next year.

Only one person showed up to oppose a racino when the council took its 2022 vote, Laflan told Tuesday’s audience.

“Six counties in Nebraska will get property tax relief because they have a racing and gambling license, and Keith County is one of them,” added County Board Chairman Lane Anderson. He referred to equal 12.5% shares of Elite’s state gaming tax payments that would go to the city and county under the state’s 2020 racino initiative.

Elite’s $100 million project would include an oval, 0.625-mile track and a casino floor with 650 slot machines, 14 table games and a betting sportsbook.

Other resort features would include a 180-room hotel and convention center, a 120-space RV park and a “high-end truck stop” with parking for 100 trucks. Restaurant options would include fine dining, family dining, a sports bar and “grab-and-go” food service.

Becker, who in 2021 had proposed all-new racinos in North Platte and Gering, joined forces with Elite in 2023 after his plans for a Hastings racino stalled. Becker, who had operated a one-day quarter horse meet at the Adams County Fairgrounds, continues to pursue plans for a Gering horse track and casino. He dropped his North Platte effort in 2022.

The state panel still must approve final plans, Haselhoff said. But she confirmed that Elite has submitted its application for a casino license — an option not immediately available to cities lacking a horse-track license holder under the state law that implemented the 2020 constitutional amendments allowing casinos at licensed horse tracks.

Tuesday’s vote was “just the rezoning of the land,” she said. “But the next steps are working with city and local officials to put a plan in front of them. Nothing’s ever smooth sailing.”

City Manager Kevin Wilkins said his administration will decide whether to grant Elite a building permit and likely will require a traffic study and engineering analysis of its I-80 site.

But with the rezoning approved, he said, the Planning Commission and City Council’s only remaining votes directly affecting the racino will come when Elite submits a subdivision replat.

The council also will decide whether to recommend a state liquor license for the casino, he said, though the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission will decide whether to grant one.

“From this point forward, in most cases, it will be no different from most major projects,” Wilkins said.