Black Hawk, Central City play their hands.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Who owns Colorado?

A YELLOW ASPHALT TRUCK, STAINED with a thick layer of black goo, lumbers up State Highway 119, slowing a ribbon of traffic for miles. Black Hawk, tile truck's destination, has its own version of T-Rex going. Half a mile of the highway, as it enters town, is being expanded to four lanes.

The $9 million project (which required moving a large part of a mountain) is just one of the public-works projects Black Hawk has undertaken since gambling was legalized there in 1991 to make it easier for betters to get to the town's casinos.

An audit done in 2001 by Greenwood Village accounting firm Clifton Gunderson found Black Hawk had issued $38.1 million in bonds over the past decade to pay for improvements to its infrastructure and to supply water to its growing population of casinos and their patrons.

That's a lot of per-capita debt for a town with just 115 citizens, yet even that amount would be dwarfed by financing of a proposed $150 million tunnel from Interstate 70 to Highway 119 that is currently under study by the state Department of Transportation. Black Hawk's casinos have promised to fund the tunnel project, and its proponents were recently reported to be upset that the highway department is taking so long to consider its potential environmental impact.

But it's not like Black Hawk is strapped for cash. In 2002, the town pocketed about $18.7 million in gambling taxes after passing on the state's share of the loot.

That equates to $162,608 per city resident. By comparison, neighboring Central City took in $11 million in gaming taxes for its 350 residents, a $31,429 take per capita; and the city of Loveland, a non-gaming town, took in $25.8 million in sales and use taxes, or about $516 per person among its 50,000 residents.

Both Black Hawk and Central City spend most of their revenue on historical preservation, which is the reason Colorado voters allowed limited-stakes gambling in three mountain towns. Cripple Creek, outside Colorado Springs, is the third gambling town in the state.

And officials in both Black Hawk and Central City say they need to make public infrastructure improvements in order to serve the crowds of gamblers who boost their populations each weekend. Central City is spending $45 million on a brand-new highway that is currently under construction and that approaches the town from the south and east. It will drop motorists directly into Central City instead of first leading them through glitzy Black Hawk, which is what Highway...