BND.com – Participants at a hearing Monday in the south Chicago suburbs on whether to expand gambling in Illinois raised similar issues to the ones raised during a previous hearing in East St. Louis. Namely:

* Would an expansion harm existing casinos?

* Will horse-racing tracks be able to survive without it?

But at the hearing in Tinley Park, there were a couple of other questions that overshadowed those: Which south-Chicago suburb should get a license for a brand new casino? And how would the revenue from that casino be shared?

State Rep. Robert Rita, D-Blue Island, who is shepherding a gambling-expansion bill in the state legislature, said the hearing Monday showed that mayors from the south-Chicago suburbs are “not on the same page” on how revenue should be shared from a new casino there. A coalition of south-Chicago communities wants the bill to include a plan for how those communities could share revenue from a south-Chicago casino, he said.

The proposed gambling expansion, which last year cleared the state Senate but wasn’t called for a vote in the House, would have allowed a new casino in Chicago as well as new casinos in Rockford, Danville, Lake County and one in the south-Chicago suburbs. The plan also would allow slot machines at Chicago’s airports and up to 900 slot machines at each of the state’s horse-racing tracks, including Fairmount Park in Collinsville.

“Some of the (South Chicago) cities that would like to move forward to obtain this, they all have different ideas,” Rita said. “They’re sort of all over the board on their ideas for the revenue-sharing part.”

BND