“Even Board of Supervisor members in New Kent annually say ‘We need to bring slots to Colonial Downs,’ ” Peace said.

“Colonial Downs sits there vacant, and there are jobs that have been lost, money that has been lost for schools in New Kent. Those are priorities that we can support over those concerns for public safety or any other reason,” Peace said.

It’s difficult to measure how much money Virginia residents are spending elsewhere gambling.

“It makes me ill,” to think of the dollars leaving Virginia, said Sen. L. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth.

Lucas has sponsored legislation in the General Assembly for at least the past four years to create a Virginia Casino Gaming Commission, a mechanism to allow casino gambling. Each year the effort has been defeated in committee. She would like to see a referendum but doubts that will happen.

Her idea is to locate a casino in the eastern part of the state, “as close to Virginia Beach as we can get and hopefully in Portsmouth,” she said.

“We are losing too much revenue out of this state,” Lucas said.

A casino would bring badly needed revenue to Portsmouth, which has a burdensome property tax rate.