The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
MGM, tribes should stop spats over casinos
We should all be thankful on Thanksgiving that even though some companies are fleeing Connecticut, at least two want to spend hundreds of millions of their own dollars here, if the government lets them.
They are the gambling purveyors, MGM Resorts International and MMCT, the joint venture of the tribes that run Foxwoods Resort and Mohegan Sun casinos. True to the holiday season, they can’t stop bickering.
Listening to the latest in a nonstop series of spats, I’d say it’s time for both sides to knock it off, go to their rooms, hunker down and work on their own projects and stop trying to undercut the other guys with public insults.
This one is about what MGM CEO Jim Murren did, or did not, say on a quarterly conference call with investors and financial analysts. What he apparently said, according to a story in the Las Vegas Sun, was that MGM is pretty much done for the time being building large-scale casinos in the United States.
Along with a huge, planned resort in Tokyo, and opening MGM Springfield next year, the company will focus on upgrades on the Strip in its hometown of Las Vegas, Murren appeared to say.
No mention of Bridgeport? Wasn’t Murren just here in September, arm-inarm with the mayor and the masters of the harbor redevelopment, declaring that Bridgeport and Tokyo were MGM’s top two projects in the world?
“MGM is so focused on Bridgeport that in its quarterly report to shareholders the idea of a Bridgeport casino didn’t even cross Mr. Murren’s mind when discussing prospects for the coming years,” MMCT spokesman Andrew Doba snapped.
Referring to the Sept. 18 event at the site, Doba said, “You would think that after a glitzy PR stunt that the CEO of MGM would think to mention it.”
The tribes’ accusation since September has been that MGM isn’t serious about Bridgeport, it only rolled out the plan as a desperate measure to kill the East Windsor casino that was approved by the state as a way to siphon customers off Interstate 91 who might drive up to MGM Springfield.
The view from Las Vegas, naturally, is quite different. Murren was responding to a question about ultra-huge projects, MGM says, and Bridgeport doesn;t rise to that level, though its planned price tag would be $675 million.
”The Tribes are merely taking what was said in one context and trying to twist it into a different context,” Uri Clinton, MGM senior vice president and legal counsel, said in a written statement. “Doing so is wrong on the facts. Period.”
Clinton reiterated that MGM is fully committed to Bridgeport, as evidenced by intense lobbying to win legislative approval for it in 2018, and the fact that Murren is slated to return to the Park City for a high-profile event Dec. 5.
But he didn’t stop there. Just as the tribes are pushing the idea that MGM is desperately fighting to kill the East Windsor plan with no real interest in Connecticut, MGM wants to portray the tribes as too cash-poor to build a new casino, hopelessly bumbling even if they had the money.
And MGM insists the East Windsor plan won’t get the federal approval it needs.
“The differences between project plans for East Windsor and Bridgeport could not be more stark: the East Windsor casino proposed by the Tribes is rapidly losing steam, while MGM Bridgeport is gaining substantial momentum by the day,” Clinton said.
”We’re not losing momentum, we are moving forward with the project and expect to see some serious movement on this site in the near future,” Doba said, declining to say whether that means site work will start in the six weeks remaining in 2017.
We could parse every one of these issues, and more. We could conclude that, yes, Murren failed to mention Bridgeport and maybe it was because of the context but it still would have been nice to hear a shout-out. As we all know by now, Murren is from Bridgeport and Fairfield and his mother and other family members still live here.
We could conclude that MMCT has moved rather slowly in the three years since the Hartford-area casino idea first surfaced. If it was going to be most effective, it should have opened by now, well ahead of MGM Springfield.
But what we think, and what they tell us, doesn’t matter anymore. What matters are the facts: The tribes have state approval for East Windsor and a statewide duopoly on casinos, but no clear federal approval to build.
MGM, for its part, has plenty of money to do what it says it will do, and it has a deal for the best, most logical casino location in Connecticut. It has no approval and it will have to persuade lawmakers to break a deal with the tribes.
Let the lawsuits fly, let the shovels dig where money and approvals are in hand and let both sides, and the state, negotiate toward a solution that works for the whole state. Beyond that, let’s all have Thanksgiving in peace and not worry about the bickering forces.