The “Village People” have come to town and they want to build us our very own “Downstown,” as long as we allow slot machines to be the anchor for an enormous retail and residential development at Scarborough Downs.

And what benefits will Scarborough get in return? No one knows for sure!

What we will get for sure is a racino with slot machines, more traffic and more crime. We are told we could be like Saratoga, N.Y. Saratoga?

• Whose racino gets 5,000 to 6,000 visits a day and is open from 10 a.m.-2 a.m. every day.

• Where the nine state police officers assigned to the racino answered 1,800 calls last year. That’s five calls a day racino security couldn’t handle. Now the state has told Saratoga it will no longer provide those officers.

• Which has just asked the state to increase the one-and-a- half-time judges to two full-time judges in that “the Gaming and Raceway over the past several years has been a place of increasing criminal filings due to the amount of people that are attending the Racino” (see http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=A11473).

And with our very own racino will we get all the extra money they’re trying to entice us with? (Mind you, there’s nothing on paper.) Are you aware that by state agreement, the host town receives only 1 percent of the net of the slot’s income? For Bangor, that was only $370,000 last year, while Penn National walked away with $29 million of the net.

Are you aware that an amount equal to what a host town receives goes to “stabilize off-track betting.” Whatever that means. Sound fair to you? (To confirm these numbers for yourself, visit www.maine.gov/dps/GambBoard/FinancialInformation.htm or call the auditor of the Gambling Board at 626-3900.)

When we do know that 94.2 percent of the money bet at Bangor comes from Maine residents within a two-hour drive of the city (Clyde W. Barrow, Center for Policy Analysis, University of Massachusetts). Why would we vote to allow such a money-sucking machine into our town?

My great uncle, Bill Randel of Waterboro, impressed upon me that gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math. Let’s do the math and vote no on slots in Scarborough.

Susan DeWitt Wilder

Scarborough