New York City needs to find out if it is getting played in the game that is casino gambling under the guise of the state lottery.
Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature injected little-noticed provisions into the state budget to empower the operator of Aqueduct racetrack’s hugely profitable casino to expand its gambling floor — plus add a 400-room hotel and convention center by 2019, with further development later.
Global gambling giant Genting operates the Resorts World Casino on land leased from the New York Racing Association, an organization that is now a de facto arm of the state. Genting controls all but the historic track and stables.
The company had been seeking to expand since at least 2012, when Cuomo suddenly wedged essentially the same proposal into his State of the State address. The plan died when Genting insisted that the state bar competing casino gambling on Long Island.
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More recently, Nassau County residents screamed down locating a casino anywhere within that jurisdiction — which had been much sought by the county’s Republican political machine to bail out its money-losing, patronage mill off-track-betting operation.
The new deal would hike Resorts World’s authorized number of electronic games at Aqueduct by 1,000 to 6,500 and send as much as $25 million annually to Nassau’s OTB — while New York City, unique among the state’s casino hosts, receives nothing. The siphoning is appalling.
Still more, Genting can be expected to seek to markedly increase its number of electronic table games, like blackjack, which are far more profitable than video lottery terminals. The trouble is that the state Constitution bars gambling save for the lottery and seven future full-blown casinos.
The technology behind the video terminals operates like a lottery, but baccarat, craps and roulette are played with real cards, dice and balls, making them straight-ahead illegal games of chance.
Invoking the constitutional gambling bar, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just took a properly hard line against fantasy sports gambling. For consistency’s sake alone, he needs to enforce the law similarly at Aqueduct, or explain why not.
Also needing close review: The pending deal terms would also permit Genting to divert revenue ordinarily earmarked for education into financing the convention center and hotel.
The company promises that those ventures would create jobs for Queens and, eventually, boost revenue so that schools would come out whole down the road.
Genting foresees $200 million in added economic activity and said in an emailed statement, “This new expansion, and its corresponding increase in visitation to our facility, will result in a boost in revenue for both New York’s education fund and the state’s horse racing industry.”
Has anyone studied the proposition? Has anyone studied what impact an Aqueduct convention center would have on business at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side?
Finally, Aqueduct is the city’s largest tract of land potentially available for affordable housing construction. As this page has long advocated, the track could be closed, the horses could be moved to Belmont, which is just eight miles away, and a whole new community could bloom.
Instead, New York City is racing toward added casino gambling that will be used in part to subsidize a failing form of gambling on Long Island.
One word: Whoa!
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