Bob Unruh wrote in an unusually detailed Oct. 22 WorldNetDaily article:
Casino gambling was approved by voters for the historic Colorado mining towns of Black Hawk and Central City some decades ago.
Since then, there have been many controversies over the industry that is given to installing Las Vegas landscapes at the 8,000-foot elevations of the Colorado foothills towns.
For example, the historic Lace House, in the way of one casino project, simply was picked up and moved to another, non-historic, location and made part of a tourist stop.
Multiple tall casinos, up to about 35 stories, now tower above the valley in Black Hawk that used to be flooded in the spring, in an “ick” procedure, when, according to local personalities, wealthy Central City residents would release water to flush the sewage that had accumulated on the streets and ditches over the winter, downhill to Black Hawk.
Central City patrons were the elites of their time, patronizing their own opera house, at times used as a stage by some of the elite performers including Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Booth, Fanie Barlow, Buffalo Bill, P.T. Barnum’s circus, later Samuel Ramey and Beverly Sills.
Central City, in another controversial move, spent millions annexing land and building an 8-mile-long “main street” to access an exit from Interstate 70 that would have gamblers direct access to their town.
The towns are in Gilpin County, which has its own history of scandalous and offensive behavior including racism. Even after the casinos started appearing, the county paid $700,000 to settle a lawsuit by a black county resident who, stunningly, was identified in official sheriff’s department documents as “N***** Roy.”
Now it is G3 Gaming, of Raleigh, N.C., that is proposing the Gregory Gulch Gaming Resort project, which would be 100,000 square feet, 1,000 slot machines, 50 gaming tables, gift shops, restaurants, 600 hotel rooms, 2,000 parking spaces and 120 housing units for workers in the very valley that connects Central City’s heights to Black Hawk, downhill.
Unruh didn’t disclose, however, that he has a history of activism and legal action in Gilpin County that calls his objectivity into question. ConWebWatch has already noted that Unruh sued the Gilpin County school district because his daughter was allegedly prohibited from handing out invitations to her Bible club during non-class hours, which resulted in Unruh being awarded $1 in damages plus attorneys’ fees. But there’s more.
In 2019, Unruh’s wife, Patti, refused to do a full review of a high school performance of the play “She Kills Monsters” for the local weekly newspaper, declaring it to be “lewd and profane.” This exploded into the Unruhs filing a defamation lawsuit the following year against the newspaper’s owner, citing in part letters to the editor the paper published. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2021, citing the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Additionally, the Unruhs along with their son Brian were removed from membership in a local church in 2020 and prohibited from entering the property, with officials stating that despite a prior removal, the Unruhs continued to represent themselves as having authority to discuss church matters.
Again, Unruh refused to disclosed any of this information to his readers. That — along with his war on Colorado for not being sufficiently far right — should raise questions about the objectivity of anything he writes.