Connecticut’s Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos are bracing for losing some percentage of their revenues to the MGM Springfield casino that will open next week 14 miles over the border. They expect to lose some of their 3,000 employees and the state is contemplating losing some percentage of the $250 million the two tribes paid to the state last year—possibly as much as 25 percent.
The number of jobs at the two casinos have flatlined in recent years, after several years during the Great Recession when they lost revenues and jobs.
Even the high-speed Hartford community rail might act as a Judas goat for sucking business from Connecticut to Massachusetts. This is something that has been freely admitted publicly by Brian Connors, Kennedy’s deputy, who recently told the Massachusetts Gaming Commission that the commuter line opens “a whole new way of transit for folks to get down into these workplaces and for people down in Connecticut to get up to visit Springfield and our attractions.”
Connecticut economist Peter Gioia, who advises the Connecticut Business & Industry Association says the effect of the casino might be neutral. Although it will lure some local players to the Bay State, it will also employ state workers, who will pay income taxes and local businesses will sell goods and services to the MGM Springfield.
Some economists assert that casinos both help and hurt the local economy by creating jobs but taking away other jobs. And entertainment money spent on a night at the casino probably won’t be spent at a local sporting event.
The Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes have tried to deaden the blow by lobbying the state legislature for permission to build a $300 million “satellite” casino in East Windsor just a few miles from the state boundary. Lawmakers granted permission, but MGM lived up to its ferocious lion’s reputation by fighting the tribes every step of the way—and its efforts probably contributed to the fact that the Department of the Interior has yet to sign off completely on the revised tribal state compacts that allow the tribes to build a commercial casino.
The tribes’ development arm MCCT Venture has begun site work on the former cinema in East Windsor, but no building yet.
Rep. Joe Verrengia, who represents Hartford, and chairs the committee that oversees gaming, told the Hartford Courant, “We owe it to those in the industry.”
However there are plenty of legislators from Bridgeport who say they owe loyalty to their home town rather than the gaming tribes. Last year and this spring they pushed HARD to alter the playing field by allowing MGM, or some other developer to bid for the right to operate a commercial casino in Bridgeport.
The tribal casinos are not only facing new competition from the MGM Springfield. On August 28 the Newport Grand in Rhode Island will close and the gaming license will be transferred to Tiverton, just a stone’s throw from Massachusetts’s Fall River. Twin River Tiverton will open on September 1.
It will 1,000 slot machines, 32 table games and 18 stadium games, an express café, two restaurants and a food court. It will offer race book and eventually sports book. Twin River, which owns the casino, recently merged with Dover Downs in Delaware, the state where the first legal sports betting outside of Nevada was conducted after the Supreme Court lifted the federal ban on it.
