Metropolitan Park Faces Off With Bally’s for Casino License

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With the number of casino contenders slashed in half, the real competition for a license in New York may boil down to two teams.

Many consider existing slot parlors — MGM Empire City in Yonkers and Queens Aqueduct Casino, operated by Resorts World — to be shoo-ins for two of the three state casino licenses up for grabs. 

That leaves New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s Metropolitan Park and Bally’s Bronx. 

For simplicity’s sake, The Real Deal decided to compare these two proposals, which many are already pitting head-to-head. That being said, the playing field is still open, the two racinos may not clinch the deals — and it’s also possible the Gaming Commission won’t award all three licenses.

“This is a tabula rasa,” Brian O’Dwyer, chair of the commission, said during a Sept. 30 meeting. “There are no front-runners or favorites.”

Cohen, who is teaming up with Hard Rock International, wants to turn 50 acres of parking lots near Citi Field into a casino complex that includes a 1,000-key hotel, a 5,650-person live music venue and 25 acres of green space. The team has billed the project as a way to turn the Flushing, Queens, ballpark into a year-round destination and to keep Mets fans onsite after games. 

The Bally’s casino would be built on 16 acres of parking lots and practice-green area at Bally’s Golf Links at Ferry Point. The project would include 500 hotel rooms and a 2,000-seat entertainment venue.

The golf course is city-owned land, which is managed by Bally’s. The company acquired the golf course’s lease from the Trump Organization in 2023. If it secures a casino license, as part of that 2023 deal, it must pay Trump $115 million, according to the New York Times.    

The state’s Gaming Facility Location Board is expected to decide who receives a casino license by Dec. 1. The state Gaming Commission will then issue the licenses before the end of the year. 

Unlike the Community Advisory Committees that eliminated four of the eight casino proposals last month — which were supposed to determine the projects’ fates based on the input of the nearby neighborhoods, but members often appeared beholden to the politicians who appointed them — the board has specific criteria for evaluating the projects. The body will consider four different categories, with “economic activity and business development” carrying the most weight (making up 70 percent of each proposal’s score). 

That category includes a project’s estimated revenue and taxes, as well as the number of jobs it will create and how much these employees will be paid. Other factors in this category include how quickly the casino can be built and proof that it can be fully financed. 

Metropolitan Park is larger than Bally’s and is expected to bring in more revenue and annual taxes. The team has said that the site is shovel-ready, and construction will begin in January if it obtains the license in December. The project is expected to be complete by June 2030, according to the team’s application. 

Construction on Bally’s would begin eight to nine months after receiving a license. 

The other categories, worth 10 percent each, include local impact siting, workforce enhancement and diversity framework. The first pertains to ways the project teams are working to minimize the impact of their projects on surrounding communities and how they will work with and promote local businesses. The last two focus on various aspects of employee hiring, training, retention and diversity.

This information is laid out in the teams’ applications, to varying degrees. Some details, including financing, are not readily available, given that the applications are heavily redacted. Metropolitan Park’s application states, however, that the development team will use a combination of debt and equity to finance construction of the project, noting that if it faces any unexpected challenge in lining up debt, “the partners are financially stable enough to raise the additional capital.” 

Here’s how Bally’s and Metropolitan Park stack up. The breakdowns are not exhaustive and only include factors that can be easily compared, i.e. numbers.

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Read more

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