With Gov. Mark Sanford's signing Thursday of a home rule gambling bill, South Carolina now has a backdoor policy on casino gambling: The action lies with casino boats, and coastal local governments can decide how extensive offshore gambling should be.

The measure empowers coastal county and municipal councils to ban casino boats from their waterfronts but exempts the two boats already sailing from Little River. If Horry County Council wants to get rid of those boats, members must, per the new law, give the boat owners five years to phase out their operations.

By doing nothing in the near term (which we suspect is what will happen), the council would bless the boats as another form of recreation for tourists; snowbirds, or those from the Northeast and Canada who vacation along the Grand Strand in the winter; and retirees. The existing Horry County moratorium on additional Little River boats, given teeth by the new law, prevents gambling expansion unless the council allows it.

Georgetown County Council, in contrast, is free to reimpose its ban on gambling vessels. Legislators solved that problem politically after a Georgetown Circuit Court judge overturned the council's 2002 gambling boat ban. S.C. Sen Ray Cleary, R-Murrells Inlet, with an able assist in the House from S.C. Rep Vida Miller, D-Pawleys Island, shepherded the measure through to passage.

Thus is the charming Murrells Inlet waterfront spared the carnival atmosphere that Greenville businessman Wallace Cheves said gambling boat would have created. The strong possibility that Cheves' lawsuit to overturn the county ban would survive on appeal impelled legislators to solve the problem themselves.

What will transpire in the other four coastal counties - Charleston, Colleton, Beaufort and Jasper - is less clear. To flourish, gambling boats need safe harbors relatively close to the ocean. Customers don't like to wait too long for boats to reach international waters so gambling can begin. That limits possible casino-boat venues in lower South Carolina to about half a dozen.

It's not inconceivable that some coastal municipality - or even a county - would see gambling boats as a source of new jobs, fees and property-tax revenue. Our local experience with the Little River boats has made clear there's a sizable market for them.

Their downside is that no authority regulates their games for honesty or checks the backgrounds of boat owners for organized crime links - nor do the boats provide state and local governments with as much tax revenue as they should.

For these reasons, we have viewed them with a jaundiced eye. If the state wants casino gambling in South Carolina, it should declare a monopoly and run a casino or casinos itself, perhaps under the auspices of the S.C. Education Lottery, while banning the boats statewide.

In the sense that the new law creates a casino-gambling policy without significant debate or public hearings, it leaves something to be desired. In that it gives coastal councils a tool for regulating the activity, however, the new law is welcome. At the very least, legislators deserve credit for letting local governments decide what character their waterfronts should have.