Gambling supplied the state with about $17.7 billion in the years since slots. Where does it go?

On a gray afternoon at Baltimore’s Carroll Park, puddles soaked the playing fields, but inside a brick recreation center, two teams of elementary students faced off in the gym, sprinting for sponge balls to hurl at their friends. Older boys gathered for a round of Uno, while younger children tossed an oversized dice on a classroom floor.

Carroll Park Recreation Center sits less than a mile away from Horseshoe Casino Baltimore, where people play cards and dice games of another sort. The two facilities, oddly, share a direct link. Revenue from the casino’s slot machines helped fund the center’s $2 million opening a year ago, transforming a former Police Athletic League building that had been vacant and graffiti-covered for more than a decade.

Before it opened, “people had to go out of thei