A process leading to the eventual licensing of three casinos in the greater New York City region has made its way into the state’s budget for the upcoming year.
A key provision of the 2021-22 spending plan calls for creation of a community advisory board to examine locations and review prospective operators for a casino in Manhattan, which is considered the big prize in a downstate market extending from the lower Hudson Valley to Long Island and where legislation passed in 2013 provides for the licenses to be awarded beginning in 2023.
The board will consist of 20 unpaid members, five each appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. They would appoint the other five members.
Both Stewart-Cousins and Heastie represent districts in the region: Westchester and the Bronx, respectively.
“Such advisory board shall have representatives of the area where the facility is to be located and any other impacted areas, which shall include but not be limited to: representatives of city government, community boards, the borough president, the City Council, the Mayor’s Office and community stakeholders.
The plan immediately elicited jeers from city leaders, who’ve made no secret of the fact that they’re dead set against a gambling hall in the Big Apple.
“There’s a lot of opposition to opening a casino in Manhattan,” acknowledged Queens Senator Joseph Addabbo, a leader of the Legislature’s pro-gaming contingent and chairman of the Committee on Racing, Gaming and Wagering in the upper house.
“Cuomo is like a mad scientist in his lab drafting language for a new casino,” one city lawmaker said.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer blasted it as “a terrible idea, just awful.”
“I’m 100 percent, 1,000 percent against it. As are all of the Manhattan elected officials that I’ve been talking to about it. We’ve all been talking about how to prevent it from happening.”
Mayor Bill De Blasio, on the other hand, indicated a willingness to consider the possibility.
“I think the Legislature is being very smart about this,” he said during a recent press conference at City Hall. “They clearly value local land-use decision-making and the rights of localities to have a say.
“I’ve always been clear about the fact that I think there’s a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to casinos𑁋and we need to be very careful about how we approach things. But we’ll work with whatever the state legislation does.”
The licensing of the downstate casinos has become a pressing issue amid the battering the state’s finances have taken in the Covid crisis. Each is expected to be charged a $500 million up-front fee, and that’s before a single dollar in taxes and other possible payments are assessed.
The prospects are equally enticing to some of the biggest names in the industry, among them Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, MGM Resorts International and Genting, all of which are pushing for licensing sooner than 2023.
MGM and Genting are believed to enjoy the pole position since both are already heavily invested in the market with massive racinos at Yonkers Raceway in the case of MGM and at Aqueduct in the case of Genting and converting them to full-scale casinos with live table games would be a relatively straightforward process.
Other locations being scouted include: Willets Point in Queens, where the New York Mets play at Citi Field; Belmont Park, also in Queens, home to Belmont Park racetrack and the stadium of the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League; and Staten Island’s St. George neighborhood, home to the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire Outlets retail complex.
