Category: casinos!!!

On Monday night I dropped in on a gym in Corona, Queens to check out the second of three community town halls scheduled by New York state senator Jessica Ramos on New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plans to build an $8 billion casino project atop the city parkland currently in use as his team’s parking lots. After the first event back in May, Ramos had definitively pumped the brakes on state legislation that would be required to convert the parkland to another use, saying “a community discussion has been sorely lacking”; local opinion had been decidedly anti-casino at the initial meeting, so anticipation was high for the much-delayed followup.

As you can probably guess if you’ve ever been to one of these things — and don’t have to if you’re already read my article on the town hall that ran yesterday in Hell Gate — the vibes were intense from the start, especially once Ramos laid out the ground rules for what she hoped would be more workshop than shouting match:

After some brief crowd work from Ramos (“I know all the carpenters want to sit together, but that may not be possible…How was everybody’s Thanksgiving? I made waffles out of stuffing the next day!”) she laid out the ground rules for the night’s event. “We are going to roll up our sleeves today,” said the senator, and make sure “everybody understands what it would mean to build this or what it would mean for us not to build this.” To that end, two balloons had been set up at opposite ends of the gym. Those who wanted to craft a potential community benefits agreement to attach to Cohen’s plan were directed to sit by the pineapple balloon; those who wanted to work on an alternative plan, perhaps achieved by creating a community land trust, would sit by the flamingo balloon.

The crowd immediately split along ideological lines. Pineapples — many of whom wore union jackets or t-shirts from a newly formed group called the Coalition for Queens Advancement that featured Cohen’s metropolitanpark.com website printed prominently on the back — were pro-casino, hoping for new jobs and wanting mostly to ensure that they would be union ones. They outnumbered by about 2-to-1 the flamingos, who brought anti-casino signs and clutched handouts from a local anti-gentrification group called the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance with a sketch of an alternative plan dubbed Phoenix Meadows that featured all green space and none of Cohen’s desired casinos, convention space, or even the ginormous parking garages (with solar panels on top) that the Mets owner planned to hold all the cars that would be displaced from the open-air parking lots. (The numerical disparity was possibly partly explained by the fact that FADA had decided to boycott the town hall as a casino-enabling sham and instead rally outside, with organizer Joseph Jung calling it an attempt to “socialize the community into accepting a casino just by trying to pass a community benefits agreement that can’t be enforced anyway.”)

Nobody on either side, it quickly became clear, had any intention of discussing their opposing stances with each other, or even writing down suggestions on the index cards that Ramos’s staff had dutifully provided for every folding table. The end of the meeting featured the senator grabbing a wireless mic and stalking the dwindling crowd like Phil Donahue, as flamingos argued that city parkland should be used for parks, while pineapples countered that since Cohen was granted a 99-year lease on the parking lots as part of his 2006 stadium deal, might as well try to extract some concessions like bike lanes or, as one of the younger participants requested, “solar panels so it doesn’t use oil or stuff that is bad.”

(If you’ve read this far and are wondering when I’m going to get to the potential public costs of all this: That part didn’t come up at all. As I noted the last time I wrote about this for Hell Gate, if the developers are able to build on city parkland without paying property taxes or rent or PILOTs or anything, that could amount to a huge public subsidy — but beyond the $8 billion construction price tag and the required $500 million tithe to the state for a casino license if one is approved, Cohen has steadfastly refused to discuss the finances of his plan, and nobody from his team showed up at the gym to take questions or even play with the pencils.)

All of which was fine enough, because aside from giving Ramos some talking points for her eventual faceoff with Cohen, nothing that was said on the evening is likely to matter much. FADA’s intimations that she’s a casino quisling aside, Ramos clearly seems intent on finding a third way that will transform the parking lots without simply swallowing the Mets owner’s plan whole: She at one point warned of “a casino that often extracts wealth and that could become obsolete now that all the gambling is happening on people’s phones,” but in the next breath declared that “we do not have the option of keeping the asphalt.” Cohen, meanwhile, has dismissed any talk of a casino-free development as “economically not feasible.” And each side has only one hammer, and that’s the power to block the other’s plans — Ramos by refusing to pass enabling legislation for development, Cohen by calmly tapping that 99-year lease and saying “casino or bust” — meaning the whole thing is likely to come down to a giant game of chicken, with both parties waiting to see who’ll blink first.

During a brief press scrum while everyone scrambled to pick their balloon affiliations, I asked Ramos how she thought those talks would go down, or even when they would happen. “I’m going to continue to meet with everybody who asks for a meeting,” she demurred. “This is going to be an ongoing conversation.” The next town hall is currently slated for sometime in 2024, after which the real haggling will no doubt commence.

New York Mets owner Steve Cohen yesterday revealed more details of his plans to build an $8 billion casino complex in the Citi Field parking lot, and, yep, that looks pretty much like it sounded when he first talked about it last winter:

Sorry, no vaportecture images with smiling gamblers raising their fists in the air while fireworks go off overhead. Gotta save something for the encore!

Cohen has said he — and/or his business partners Hard Rock, who would run the casino — will put up the $8 billion, but there are still a few question marks about the plan. First off, Cohen does not actually own a casino license: He’s hoping to be granted one of three expected to be given out by the state for the NYC area in the next year or three. This, in fact, is a large part of why he’s had this “Metropolitan Park” plan sketched out now, as the state is expected to prioritize projects that seem shovel-ready — to avoid going through the lengthy vetting process and then ending up with a project that can’t actually happen.

“Can actually happen” is up in the air as well, though, as Cohen doesn’t actually own the land he wants to build on, which is city-owned parking lots that are technically public parkland. Courts have consistently ruled that “fun stuff” does not qualify as a legally recognized park activity, so that means the state legislature would have to pass a bill demapping the parking lots as parkland. Jeff Aubrey, the state assemblymember who represents the district, has already introduced a bill to do so; Jessica Ramos, the state senator who represents the district and who also may challenge Mayor Eric Adams for City Hall in two years, has so far declined to introduce a parallel bill, saying she wants to hear more from her constituents and consider other alternatives for the site. “If you look at everybody who spoke, about two-thirds expressed not wanting a casino,” Ramos told me after holding a town hall on the project in May; she has annoucned another one for Monday, November 27.

Of course, Cohen has a hammer, too, which is that as the leaseholder for the parking lots, nothing can really happen on the site without his say-so. There is likely lots of gamesmanship still to come, in other words, not to mention financial details of who will pay what rent and property taxes — if an $8 billion casino development gets deemed tax-exempt because it’s on public land, that’d be a ton of tax breaks. Right now this is just about Cohen getting the ball rolling on building public support (or at least legislative support) for his casino dreams, and trying to make his plan seem less vapory than the ones across town.