Arundel Mills slots opponents now suing Cordish 

Posted: 2:10 pm Tue, March 16, 2010
By Liz Farmer
Daily Record Business Writer

Opponents of a planned slots casino near Arundel Mills are striking back against a lawsuit filed by the developer that claims their work to fight his project was done illegally.

Stop Slots at Arundel Mills, Citizens Against Slots at the Mall, the Maryland Jockey Club and FieldWorks LLC filed motions in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Tuesday to intervene in the suit (PPE Casino Resorts Maryland LLC, et al. v. Anne Arundel County Board of Supervisors of Elections).

The group and individual representatives also filed an “anti-SLAPP” motion, referring to the Maryland SLAPP suit statute that prohibits meritless suits brought by large private interests to deter citizens from exercising their political or legal rights. (SLAPP is an acronym that stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.)

The groups succeeded last week in getting the required number of signatures approved by the County Board of Elections to bring the development to referendum. This November, county voters will decide whether the County Council should have allowed zoning for the slots site planned by Baltimore developer David Cordish.

After the coalition filed its first batch of nearly 24,000 signatures with the county last month, Cordish filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the signatures, saying they were collected in a fraudulent manner.

Joseph Weinberg, a managing partner for Cordish Co., said in a statement at the time that irregularities were “common when signatures on a petition are gathered primarily by paid workers that are financially incentivized to produce signatures.”

The jockey club had hired Washington-based FieldWorks to help collect signatures, and according to a Feb. 19 report, had paid $377,000 to the firm for its services. But those involved in the petition drive say the jockey club’s funding has been fully disclosed and is within the parameters of the law.

“Their attempt to use the courts to scare us off won’t work,” Rob Annicelli, president of Stop Slots at Arundel Mills, said in a statement Tuesday. “That’s just what the anti-SLAPP suit laws are all about.”

Track officials say Cordish’s slots facility would hurt business at Laurel Park, which lies about 13 miles south of the site and is operated by the Maryland Jockey Club. The jockey club, whose parent company, Magna Entertainment Corp., is in bankruptcy, submitted a slots license application last year for Anne Arundel County but was disqualified for not including the $28.5 million license fee.

Cordish was awarded the county’s only slots license last year.

As of Friday, 21,847 signatures had been approved by the elections board; 18,790 signatures are required. To date, more than 40,400 signatures have been filed, and thousands are still being processed.

“What really galls me is that over 21,000 signatures have been approved and verified by the County Board of Elections, yet PPE Casino challenges less than two dozen of those signatures and claims that there has been massive fraud,” said Heather Ford, coalition coordinator for Citizens Against Slots at the Mall.