A sliver of hope involving casino development in Atlantic City would be welcome right now, but a permit review to build a new casino in the resort currently underway isn’t likely to fit the bill.
A public comment phase has begun for environmental permits on a plan to build an 850-room casino hotel and 3,000-space parking garage at the foot of Albany Avenue—one of the main entrances to the city. But the plan is a leftover from 2012 when Hard Rock International planned to build a new “boutique” casino.
The company backed off those plans as Atlantic City’s casino revenue continued a steady decline. Now, three resort casinos could be shutting down at the end of the summer and the Atlantic Club Casino—nearest to the proposed site—closed in January.
An investigation by the local Press of Atlantic City could not determine if plans are actually in place to build a new casino. More likely, a new developer of the site is just continuing the long process of receiving environmental permits to build on the beachfront site.
In other words, the company may just be hedging its bets since the permit—called a called a CAFRA permit for the Coastal Area Facility Review Act—would be good for five years and could be extended.
The Hard Rock plan called for phased construction of a casino on land bounded by Pacific Avenue, Hartford Avenue, the Boardwalk and Roosevelt Avenue. A garage would be built on an adjacent tract, near O’Donnell Memorial Park, according to the Press.
A new company, A.C. Gateway Owner LLC, which is a joint project of Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co. and the real estate investment fund Arefin US Investment LLC, has revived the permit request, the Press reported.
The company would not comment on its plans for the site.
Several lawyers familiar with CAFRA permitting speculated to the paper that since the permit process was already well underway under the Hard Rock proposal, the new developer might simply want to finish the process and have the permit in hand should it ever decide to build on the site, or possibly sell it.
Still, that would mean the casino market would have to change drastically in the city, but five years is a long time.
