MGM Springfield President Mike Mathis says he can feel the excitement from residents of Springfield, Massachusetts as the 0 million casino project moves forward now that the state Gaming Commission has given it the final go-ahead.
Mathis made the comments after meeting for 90 meetings with 50 residents of the downtown area where he gave the most recent details of the project and fielded questions.
He declared, “Now that it has started you can see our commitment is a real commitment. I think there is a sense this is coming to life and it will be here in September of ’18. I feel it on the streets and I feel it in the coffee shops when I see people and they are excited about it. It’s nice to have that energy back.”
He conceded that the company had some anxious moments who news leaked prematurely last year that MGM was planning to scale back its project by about 15 percent, including replacing a 25-story hotel tower with a six-story building with the same number of rooms: 252.
Now there’s nothing but positive energy with the project on schedule to open in September of 2018.
One of the 50 leaders that Mathis met with was said Carol Costa, president of the downtown civic association, who exclaimed, “We are just so excited about this project in downtown Springfield.”
Costa added, “No one has been a better partner to us and better friend to us in the neighborhood, particularly this downtown neighborhood, than MGM,” Costa said. “We want this community to be informed, we want them to be excited, we want them to think positively about what is going happen in downtown Springfield.”
During his PowerPoint presentation Mathis promised that the casino will work “hand-in-hand” with the Springfield Police Department and deploy surveillance cameras extensively while promising that the crowds typical to a casino will create a safe environment.
On May 12, slightly more than two years after being granted the license for the Western part of the state, MGM broke ground on the casino resort. The groundbreaking happened the same day that the Massachusetts Gaming Commission endorsed the redesign.
Given that the legislature approved the Gaming expansion act in 2011, many critics think it is absurd that it is taking this long for the first state-sanctioned casino resort to come online.
They point out that the delays have made it possible for the long-delayed First Light Casino project of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to steal a march on the MGM, as well as the Wynn Boston Harbor, even though the tribe just got its own permission to build from the federal government.
The tribe anticipates open First Light Casino sometime next year, with a hotel to follow in 2018.
These delays will also give more time for neighboring Connecticut’s two gaming tribes, the Mohegans and Pequots, to build their third satellite casino in order to inoculate the state against the MGM Springfield.
