Here are three points to ponder, as my favorite sports columnist, Kevin Gleason likes to say, while waiting to see who gets licenses to build casinos in New York.
First, the state is wading into this at a time when revenue is declining and competition is increasing. All of those applying to build casinos in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties know the challenges very well because they have read the bad news coming out of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Their hope, and by extension ours, is that by building casinos in New York they can tap a new and underserved market. If that accelerates the troubling trends in those properties in nearby states, it won’t be our worry, at least not right away.
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Second, while everybody is focused on who gets a license where, the man most responsible for pushing the state to this point is looking ahead to the new, post-casino reality. Sen. John Bonacic, R-Mount Hope, has introduced S6913, a bill that would allow online gambling in New York.
He told The Associated Press that he does not expect any action on this until after the state sees how the new casino licenses work, but he believes it is time to start talking about it.
New Jersey started allowing people to gamble from home in November and revenue has increased each month but not enough to offset declines from Atlantic City.
Online gambling might be cutting into the money spent at casinos. Or the two might be operating in parallel. While casinos suffer from too much competition and overbuilding, the online alternative takes advantage of a general shift in society toward doing more things on the Internet. Look at it that way and getting into the online gaming business makes sense for New York sooner rather than later.
But the third point is the one that I find most intriguing.
People in Sullivan and Ulster are upset with the emergence of Orange as a competitor for a license. This was supposed to help them, and Bonacic got a promise that they would get two of the casinos. So if the Gaming Commission fulfills that promise, they can breathe easier because there would be no license for Orange County in a future round of applications, the way the enabling legislation is now crafted.
That’s good for Ulster and Sullivan, not so good from the Orange point of view. But we don’t know how the members of the commission are going to look at this.
It’s hard to imagine that the commissioners will grant one license in Sullivan and one in Ulster when that decision denies forever the chances of a casino going up in Orange County, a location that even its opponents — especially its opponents — argue would have a better chance of turning a profit. Yet if the commission splits the decision, it puts a casino in Orange County to undermine the chances for the remaining casino farther north to get the traffic it needs.
