When Wynn Resorts quietly launched a campaign to scuttle a proposal for a slots parlor in neighboring Revere last month, the opposition group hired someone with fresh insight into Revere’s electorate — the campaign manager for Mayor Brian M. Arrigo’s election last fall.
Gregory Maynard engineered the upset victory that ousted two-term mayor Dan Rizzo and installed Arrigo, then a 35-year-old city councilor. Rizzo attributed his loss to his failure to bring a casino to Suffolk Downs, the mostly dormant race track that spans Revere and East Boston.
With another developer now trying to build a slots parlor near the race track, Maynard reemerged this week as a silent player behind the stealth campaign to block it. He was listed as a paid consultant to an opposition campaign committee called Revere Can Do Better, created one week before Tuesday’s special election on the slots parlor, according to paperwork filed with the city Elections Department Friday.
Arrigo had recorded an automated call for the Revere Can Do Better committee, urging voters to defeat the slots parlor. In an interview on Wednesday, he said it was Maynard who asked him to record the message but that he didn’t know Wynn was funding the campaign.
“He didn’t say who he was working for,’’ Arrigo said. “He asked me if I’d be willing to do a robocall.’’
A Revere resident who formed a second opposition campaign, called Citizens for A Better Revere, said he, too had been approached by Maynard, a Facebook friend, who asked him to use his mailing address as the return address on a flier. He assumed they were just cooperating in their opposition.
“If Greg Maynard works for Wynn, I don’t know that,’’ Marc Silvestri said. “I had no idea it was a totally separate entity than what we were doing.’’
Maynard did not respond to requests for comment.
Arrigo’s alignment with Wynn marks a sudden about-face for the city of Revere. Until Arrigo’s election last year, the city of Revere staunchly opposed the Wynn casino and joined Boston and Somerville, as well as Mohegan Sun, in a lawsuit to block the casino in Everett.
The Globe reported on Thursday that Wynn had quietly funded an opposition campaign against the Revere-only ballot question, which asked voters to allow a slots parlor to be licensed at a particular location in the city.
Revere voters shot down the proposal, but the vote was nonbinding. The developer behind it, Eugene A. McCain Jr., said he will persist in his parallel effort to win a Nov. 8 ballot question that could authorize another casino license.
McCain’s campaign is filing a complaint with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance requesting an investigation claiming the committees may have violated campaign finance law and noting some fliers did not disclose who was paying for them or name their top contributors. His campaign is also asking the state to look at whether Revere employees were campaigning against the proposal on city time.
In a campaign finance report filed Friday, the Wynn-backed Revere Can Do Better committee disclosed that it paid Maynard $1,150 on Wednesday for “campaign field and outreach services.’’ The committee also paid Saint Consulting Group and an affiliated group more than $11,000 through Thursday for “digital media, outreach services’’ and “campaign management and outreach.’’
Wynn previously worked with Saint Consulting, a Hingham-based consultancy that specializes in controversial land-use campaigns, to win local support for its casino in Everett.
The balance of the $39,000 that Wynn directed toward the campaign against the slots parlor went to pay for a mailer sent to Revere voters and to another campaign operative, Kimball Political Consulting, for “database, voter ID, live and automated’’ calls.
Arrigo has been an outspoken opponent of the project and even unsuccessfully sued to try to block a special election on the slots parlor proposal. Arrigo has criticized the proposal as shadowy and fly-by-night and highlighted McCain’s unwillingness to reveal his financial partners.
After the vote against the slots parlor, Revere issued a statement that said the city had sent a message that “no amount of dark money or misleading advertising can sway us from the high standards that we hold as a community.’’
But after the revelation of Arrigo’s work with a Wynn-backed opposition group, McCain’s campaign blasted the mayor, saying he “colluded with’’ a casino competitor to deceive residents of Revere and questioning what his city would get out of it. An attorney for the campaign filed a public records request, seeking all communications with the Arrigo administration about the special election.
“Unfortunately, it appears that Mayor Arrigo is more concerned about taking care of the needs of the Wynn Corporation and citizens of Everett, over the needs of the citizens of Revere,’’ said a statement from the campaign.
Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @StephanieEbbert.
