Casino Movement

Rocky Mount City Council approved a 60-day moratorium Monday on new sweepstakes gaming parlors and instructed the planning board to develop local regulations for the controversial businesses.

At least seven such shops, often called Internet sweepstakes cafes, have opened in Rocky Mount during the past several months.

City officials proposed the moratorium to give planners time to study the businesses and to come up with a set of zoning guidelines.

Some elected city officials say the gaming parlors bend state gambling laws and are a blight on the community.

“I see (the games) as an opportunity to prey on people who are already living at risk,” Councilman Reuben Blackwell said.

Rocky Mount would be following a statewide trend in implementing stringent local regulations on sweepstakes cafes.

So far, the sweepstakes gaming industry has managed to get around each effort by state lawmakers to ban them as illegal gambling, as the N.C. General Assembly did with video poker.

Several Rocky Mount sweepstakes cafe owners had expressed plans to speak out during the City Council meeting, but nobody stepped forward during a public hearing on the moratorium.

The city will have until April 9 to implement regulations on the gaming parlors.

In other business, the council approved the “Ask Me Why I Love Rocky Mount” public image campaign, agreed to designate the Villa Place neighborhood as a local historic district and scheduled the annual City Council retreat for Feb. 17 and 18 at the American Tobacco Complex in Durham.