Reasons aplenty are being offered in support a downtown riverboat casino: Des Moines can’t capture property taxes on about 40 percent of the real estate in the city, its infrastructure is crumbling and basic services have been cut back, so gambling revenue is needed for capital improvement projects. The downtown entertainment venues aren’t drawing the huge crowds that flock to suburban bars with no more special appeal than the promise of young, perfectly tanned and clothed bodies packed onto a patio listening to tired music from the ’80s played by a DJ. We’re fresh out of better options (though, arguably, if a riverboat casino is our last hope for help, we’re already so hopeless it won’t help).

There’s one compelling reason Des Moines should back away from the race to obtain a license if and when the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission lifts its moratorium on riverboat casino expansion. Take a page from the book on enlightened self-interest, the concept that Iowa Department of Economic Development Director Mike Blouin is touting across the state. If a Des Moines riverboat casino is bad for Iowa, can it be good for Des Moines?

If Des Moines wants to be a good state citizen, it’ll let Osceola both keep its riverboat afloat and retain its little slice of the “Iowa nightmare”: government’s hungry addiction to gambling revenues. Osceola, in Southern Iowa where the farm ground is poor, the population is sparse and employment opportunities are rare, makes a better case for gambling than Des Moines. Here, the potential for creative economic development efforts makes turning to riverboat gambling a banal, anile approach.

Iowa can support only so many casinos. It doesn’t take an actuary to figure out that some of the current operations will hemorrhage red ink if too many are added in a grab for quick money so desperate that the greedy don’t even pause for breath long enough to assess whether the prize actually is fool’s gold. Lots of rural Iowans already argue the state’s small towns were emptied out to provide Greater Des Moines with its workforce. “You want it all?” they might legitimately ask. “Take the hogs, too.”

I love rural Iowa and mourn what appears to be its slow passing. I think all the hogs concentrated out there in the country are a big enough migraine without adding the headaches of gambling. But if gambling is the state’s last if not best hope for economic development, let’s at least put it in rural Iowa, where the not-so-negative side of it – jobs, taxes, tourism – can be seen and felt. Given the millions of dollars of salaries paid by employers to 65,000 downtown Des Moines workers, a casino’s payroll wouldn’t provide that big of a boost.

I hate saying that. It’s like saying it’s OK for rural Iowans to operate meth labs because there aren’t a lot of other employment options in the state’s small towns and drug trafficking at least keeps cash in circulation.

There are too many “maybes” that haven’t been explored. Maybe we have enough gambling in Iowa, period, no debate. Or maybe the real debate shouldn’t be about whether and where more gambling should be added, but how government can slowly wean itself from the tax revenues it provides. Maybe it isn’t selfish for Des Moines to want riverboat gambling. Maybe it’s masochistic.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director for Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.