Less than a year into New York’s experiment in commercial casinos, revenue projections are falling by the wayside and operators say they expect more tough times ahead.
“The party is over,” said attorney John Donnelly, speaking for Schenectady’s Rivers Casino & Resort at a recent conference on gaming and racing law in Saratoga sponsored by Albany Law School.
Rivers generated $56.8 million in gaming revenue from its opening the first week of February through June 30, an annual pace that’s off by half from the $223 million a year the property is projecting by 2019.
Del Lago Resort & Casino in Tyre, near Rochester, which also opened in February, posted $63.1 million over the same period, down 42 percent from the $263 million it projected for its first full year.
Results at Tioga Downs Casino, which opened in December in Nichols in south-central New York in December, have been similarly disappointing, based on tax payments to the state that amount so far to around half the property’s first-year projections.
“I think the market is saturated and we’ve got a lot of work to do to get the revenues where they need to be,” said owner Jeff Gural.
Rivers, Tioga and del Lago are the first non-Indian casinos to open in the state since voters approved a constitutional change allowing the state to license up to seven such facilities four years ago. A fourth, Resorts World Catskills, is slated to come on line early next year. Also, the Oneida Indian Nation started construction this summer in Bridgeport on its third casino, the Point Place, featuring 65,000 square feet of gambling and entertainment space and scheduled to open next spring within 25 miles of the tribe’s flagship Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona.
So, if anything, the market is only going to get more crowded. And that’s not counting the possibility of more casinos authorized by the referendum opening in New York City as early as 2023.
As Gural put it, “We are all fighting for the same customer.”
But one of the conference speakers, Robert Williams, executive director of the state Gaming Commission, noted that “it’s too early to draw any conclusions” about how the new properties are faring or will.
“The full amenities are not yet open,” he said.
Laura McAllister Cox of Rush Street Gaming, the parent company for Rivers, said that as in other regions the New York market will eventually undergo a period of “right-sizing”.
