House of Cards
What mischief has Seth Carey wrought?
(page 1 of 2)
If an audacious referendum passes this month, a Nevada casino executive, Dean Harrold, might soon be one of the most powerful people in Maine. That’s not what Rumford attorney Seth Carey wanted. It was supposed to be him.
When the thirty-three-year-old Carey first conceived of building a casino in Oxford County and began the process of gathering signatures to put the proposal on the statewide ballot, he saw himself in the role of potential kingpin. And as such Carey wrote his referendum granting himself and the company he founded, Evergreen Mountain Enterprises, incredible powers — a ten-year monopoly on casino operations in the state, carte blanche on where it is built, and permanent voting seats on the boards of some of the most important agencies in Maine, including the Finance Authority of Maine, the University of Maine System, and the Land for Maine’s Future program. Carey’s law asks voters to keep the 1,500 slot machine limit for track-related racinos while giving Evergreen an unlimited number of slots, plus table games such as blackjack and roulette. It would drop the legal gambling age to nineteen. And it would allow the casino to extend house credit to gamblers but not let them use their credit or debit cards.
Carey’s plan was to make himself one of Maine’s wealthiest and most powerful men, but things did not go as planned. Along the way he ran into complaints of ethical and legal malfeasance, accusations of dishonesty from his own spokesperson, and widespread charges of business naiveté. His campaign stumbled badly, and in mid-September he sold Evergreen Mountain Enterprises to the Olympia Group, a Las Vegas-based gaming and resort developer. As a result, Seth Carey’s legacy will undoubtedly be different from the one he intended. And for Mainers, who might soon find unknown, out-of-state casino executives making decisions about their healthcare and universities, it might well be an enduring and troublesome legacy indeed.
To understand how Maine ended up with such a brash and sweeping proposal on the November ballot, you need to know something about the man who created it. And finding the real Seth Carey has not been easy to do. Extensive media interviews in the past two years have been nonexistent — he failed to respond to half a dozen telephone and e-mail requests for an interview for this article — and his public statements are limited to platitudes and generalities. His high-profile spokesperson, former gubernatorial candidate Pat LaMarche, joined the campaign in April and quit in August, complaining that staying would have forced her to lie to the people of Maine. She returned in September when the sale to Olympia Group was announced.
Despite his leading role, Carey made no effort to contact the Oxford County commissioners to explain his plans. He placed no advertisements in newspapers or television. His campaign plans focused on touring Maine county fairs handing out bumper stickers from an old U-Haul truck modified to burn biodiesel. It all sounded rather quixotic.
Certainly Carey started out seriously enough. Last year he organized a statewide petition campaign that collected nearly 56,000 signatures, more than enough to force a referendum on the question. In testimony before the legislature’s Legal and Veteran’s Affairs Committee, he argued that his casino would bring new jobs and vitality to economically depressed western Maine and specifically to his hometown of Rumford. He promised an eco-friendly, super-green, four-season resort with art galleries devoted to Maine artists, a spa, a craft brewery, ATV trails, and helicopter tours. A video of his testimony showed a tall, dark-haired man who spoke with passion about the casino’s impact.
Income from the casino would benefit a grab bag of interests, ranging from biofuels research and creative economy grants to student loan reimbursements and the Land for Maine’s Future. Property tax relief, the Dirigo healthcare program, public access television, and the east-west highway proposal would share in the largesse. The entire list runs to twenty-two paragraphs in the bill.
One of the conditions, however, is that the president of Evergreen Mountain Enterprises must be made a voting member of the board of every organization that receives a share of the casino’s income. Originally that person would have been Carey. But since the sale to Olympia, that provision would put Nevada resident Harrold on the governing bodies of agencies and organizations all over Maine, from the Maine Community College System board of trustees to Dirigo Health to environmental organizations involved in cleaning up the Androscoggin River.
Those who know Carey (who maintains a minority interest in the company) describe an idealistic but naïve man who genuinely wants to help Rumford and western Maine. “He’s a young many trying very hard to make a difference,” says J. Arthur Boivin, chairman of the Rumford Board of Selectmen. “It’s a little difficult for him to do that because of his lack of experience.”
“He legitimately wants to help his community,” says Tony Ronzio, editorial page editor for the Lewiston Sun-Journal, who knows Carey and has followed the casino campaign from the beginning. “There is no doubt in my mind that this is not just some get-rich-quick scheme.”
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