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A Statehouse veteran with no gaming experience now oversees the new gambling joints in Columbus and three other major Ohio cities.
Matt Schuler in his downtown office.
Dan Trittschuh
A 45-year-old Gahanna resident may be the most important state regulator Central Ohioans have never heard of . . . yet.
His name is Matt Schuler, the recently appointed executive director of the Ohio Casino Control Commission. As such, Schuler will be the Statehouse official ultimately responsible for overseeing the new Hollywood Casino Columbus, now under construction on Georgesville Road, as well as three other Ohio casinos, also under construction, in Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati.
Schuler, a Statehouse veteran, had been the state Senate’s chief of staff for six years when, to the surprise of some bystanders, the commission asked him to consider heading its staff. “I did not apply for the job,” Schuler says.
That surprise was sparked by, as he readily concedes, his lack of gaming experience. But, he adds, “The first job is to build a new state agency”—and, of course, build it right. And that’s a challenge his experience and connections likely match.
“I have a huge regard for Matt,” says commission chair Jo Ann Davidson, who got to know Schuler while serving in the Ohio House of Representatives (from 1981 to 2000, the last six years as speaker). “He’s a hardworking, intelligent person with the kind of integrity you need.”
What Ohioans likely will get from Schuler is fair, by-the-book diligence, not flash, according to Teri Geiger, the Senate chief of staff who lured Schuler back to the Statehouse in 1998 to become Senate clerk. “Matt is very meticulous, very organized, really detail-oriented,” says Geiger, now a key aide to U.S. Sen. Rob Portman. “How that translates, management-wise [at the casino commission] is that the people Matt hires will pay attention to detail.” As well they should: The Ohio Constitution’s “casino section” is 2,400 words of legalese, and the 2010 implementation state law is a 185-page wheeze.
Right-building the commission is critical. The panel will chaperone the state as it steps tippy-toe into a new world (for Ohio) of Vegas-style gaming. First and foremost, the panel will license “casino operators, management companies, holding companies, gaming related vendors, key employees and casino gaming employees”—and those who own or control a casino. And the law allows Schuler to make recommendations on those matters to the commissioners.
In plain English, the commission can decide who will, or won’t, profit from Ohio’s casinos—for that matter, even who is allowed inside them. The 2010 implementation law requires the commission to have a force of “gaming agents” (in effect, casino police). They’ll have arrest powers and the right to eject a person from a casino for specified legal reasons—and if the commission determines that a person’s “presence within a casino . . . may call into question the honesty and integrity of [its] gaming operations.”
And money’s in play. According to the Legislative Service Commission, the 33 percent tax on gross casino revenue may produce about $579.2 million a year for Ohio’s local governments, school districts and cities hosting the four casinos. While no jackpot—about $50 per Ohioan—it’s still welcomed new revenue.
The first Ohio casino, the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland, was scheduled to open March 26, but licensing delays may push its debut into late spring. Meanwhile, Penn National Gaming has stated in regulatory filings its Columbus casino will have up to 3,000 slot machines, 70 table games and 30 poker tables, plus the usual food, drink and entertainment options. If all goes according to plan, it will open before the end of 2012.
By then, some light may be shed on the wisdom of naming Schuler as a casino czar without any experience in gaming. He considers it a fair question. “There are pros and cons to both,” he says, in terms of his new assignment. But, Schuler adds, in policymaking, as in politics, “You get smart, you get help—or you get out.” Given Schuler’s résumé, it’s impossible to question his Statehouse smarts. And some key initial hires indicate he’s more than able to find experienced help.
Schuler hired Christopher Storcella, retired director of licensing for the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, to be the commission’s director of licensing. And joining the body as compliance chief is Patrick Martin, former chief counsel of the Kansas Racing and Gaming Commission. Schuler also persuaded respected Ohio House clerk Laura Clemens to head the commission’s government relations and anti-addictive-gambling programs.
In mid December, the commission had 11 employees. When fully staffed, it likely will have 100 to 120, Schuler says, although a temporary bulge is possible—to, say, 140 to 150—during casino start-ups. “I don’t think we’ll get to that many,” he says.
Schuler, a Mansfield native, is a 1990 summa cum laude political science grad from Ohio State. He and wife Jill have four children, whose ages range from 5 to 12. Jill Schuler, who earned a PhD in Slavic and East European languages and literatures from OSU, is a member of the Gahanna-Jefferson Board of Education. The Schulers met when he was studying Russian and she was a teaching assistant.
Matt Schuler, while still at OSU, was appointed a Senate page with the help of then-Sen. Dick Schafrath, a Wooster Republican; as luck would have it, Schuler’s résumé arrived in Schafrath’s office the very day a page job opened.
Later, Schuler joined the Senate’s fiscal office, which manages the Senate’s employee payroll and such. Then he got what amounted to a graduate education in budgeting for state government: He became an aide for two budget cycles (roughly, four years) to then-Sen. Ted Gray, an Upper Arlington Republican and 43-year legislator who chaired the Senate’s finance committee. Schuler left the Statehouse to join the staff of the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, but returned to the Senate in 1998 to become clerk when Martha Butler retired.
In the fall of 2005—tail end of Republican Gov. Bob Taft’s administration, eve of Democrat Ted Strickland’s—Schuler became Senate chief of staff, answering first to president Bill Harris, an Ashland Republican, then to Harris’s successor, suburban Cincinnati Republican Tom Niehaus.
Republicans have run the state Senate since 1985. The Senate majority staff—especially since term-limits started in 1993—is considered not only top-notch, but also high-powered. Jesters sometimes claim GOP senators work for the Senate Republican staff, rather than vice-versa.
But Schuler’s decision to try something new wasn’t unexpected. “I think he could have stayed in the Senate as long as he wanted,” says Capitol Square super-lobbyist Neil Clark, himself a former key Senate Republican aide. Clark says most Senate chiefs of staff only get to work for one Senate president, not, like Schuler, two. Clark adds that being the hand-holder and near-confessor to Republican senators means “the job can get pretty monotonous.”
Schuler, asked about his decision to leave the chief of staff position, says, “There can come a point when you feel as if you are passing the same street.”
Hollywood Casino Columbus and the other three Ohio casinos are the result of a November 2009 statewide ballot issue, with 53 percent of those voting authorizing the gambling establishments. (It lost inside Franklin County, incidentally.) The 2009 ballot issue was the first successful attempt of five over 19 years to bring casino gambling to Ohio. The victorious issue authorized an Arena District site for the Columbus casino. The Titans of Columbus emphatically opposed that location and persuaded the General Assembly to submit a relocation amendment to Ohio voters. Legislators did, and voters ratified it in 2010. The amendment re-sited the Hollywood Casino from the Arena District to the west side.
That Columbus site fight was dust-up No. 1 in the wake of the victory in 2009. Dust-up No. 2 was the General Assembly wrangling over implementing the ballot issue; when finally enacted, in June 2010, the law capped the commission’s executive director’s pay at $146,286, making it hard (critics said) to hire a heavily experienced regulator working in another state, virtually all of them paid more. (Schuler’s salary is $138,507—the same as his wage as Senate chief of staff.)
In Dust-up No. 3, Ohio’s Republican-run Senate refused to confirm Strickland’s seven appointments to the Casino Control Commission, including Columbus Republican Rocky Saxbe, whom Strickland wanted to chair the panel. Republicans said then-newly elected Gov. John Kasich should get to pick the commissioners. Late last February, he did. His appointees include Davidson (whom Kasich designated as commission chair) and Ranjan Manoranjan, a political independent who is chief executive officer of Dublin-based 3SG Corp.
Dust-up No. 4 was a fight over whether the Columbus casino would, or would not, annex to Columbus; Penn National had wanted Columbus water and sewer services for the west side site, which was in Franklin Township—but not annexation to Columbus. After complicated legal and political maneuvers, Columbus got the casino, Penn National received $15 million from the city for environmental work at the old Delphi manufacturing site and a buyer (an arm of Nationwide) for Penn National’s original Arena District site. (See “Saving the Blue Jackets” on page 46.)
Davidson, a political confidant of Kasich, is every inch a lady, but—to adapt Ohio’s state flower to the Southern term “iron magnolia”—she’s also an iron carnation. Davidson is nobody’s fool and impossible to bully.
Kasich’s appointment of Davidson was about as strong a signal as there could be that the governor and his Columbus allies want a fair and no-nonsense cop to police Ohio casinos. In Schuler, who says a key attraction of switching jobs was the chance to work with Davidson, she’s likely found, by almost all accounts, the right executive officer.
Tom Suddes is an editorial board member of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a columnist on Ohio politics and an adjunct assistant journalism professor at Ohio University.
