Here are some further comments from the North Jersey casino referendum forum that I attended Monday night at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City – starting with Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian, who was born in that very city in 1953:
Speaking to reporters before the event, Guardian said he simply wants Governor Christie and state Senate President Stephen Sweeney to set “benchmarks” for the city to meet as part of the state intervention – some call it “takeover” – bill that has passed the Senate but not yet the Assembly.
He also said he would pray for God to give Christie the “wisdom that God gave to Solomon, to try to take care of the good people of Atlantic City.”
Guardian added that he had met with the Trenton-based Local Finance board earlier that day and was denied a bridge loan that he requested given the city’s tenuous finances (see other blog posts this week).
Defaulting on bonds was not something Guardian said he could do – otherwise, he said, every other municipality would face a “rough time.” Guardian said while is a local mayor, he also is a “resident of New Jersey, too.”
While the battle in Trenton over a pair of AC bills continued today, and Guardian has said he would shut down City Hall for most services from April 8-May 2 if no truce is reached, I also asked him if there still was time to do so.
He said yes, that they would need only “48 hours” to reverse such plans.
Guardian, who grew up in West New York and Palisades Park, also wondered “how is the Pulaski Skyway going to handle” all the traffic from a Jersey City casino [that will be addressed later].
Atlantic City was described by its mayor as “urban and gritty, and we could become a great city.”
Guardian reprised his theory that Manhattan would quickly get a casino should the Meadowlands get one. But this time he also posited that Suffern or Tuxedo – not far beyond the North Jersey border – also could get one to keep the New York money in New York.
Meadowlands Regional Chamber CEO Jim Kirkos said he is “sensitive to what Atlantic City is going through,” both because of his work in economic development but also because “we lost two sports franchises, they took my arena away from us, and we lost a golf course complex called EnCap that never materialized. American Dream [the shopping and entertainment complex] will happen, but I’m on the job 15 years supporting it and the project hasn’t happened yet.”
Kirkos also appears more bullish than many on AC’s prospects, saying that “future job growth could be astounding” if mixed-use projects such as the one related to AC Devco succeed. “I don’t buy into the philosophy that no one wants to invest in Atlantic City,” he said.
Assemblyman Ralph Caputo, D-Essex, a former AC casino executive, said the majority of the city’s customers are within 50 or 75 miles. He also would not recommit to a previous “guess” of a tax rate of 40 to 60 percent for North Jersey casinos. Caputo said he doesn’t want to get too deep into such weeds, basically, until Guardian and the state address the city’s urgent budget woes.
Caputo did say – and others agreed – that it would be important for voters to have more details about the North Jersey casino referendum than they currently have. He added that the injection of up to $200 million annually to the city from the new casino taxes up north are AC’s best hope because the state otherwise doesn’t have the revenue to help.
In what has become a staple of Caputo AC analysis, he ripped casino owners there “who could care less about the citizens of the state of New Jersey. They’re selfish – they don’t care about anybody’s well-being but their own.”
Resorts AC CEO Mark Giannantonio – who has known Caputo for years – replied that his casino’s owner, Morris Bailey (the thoroughbred horseman and real estate mogul) is a “great guy” and that the casino pays for employee weddings.
Giannantonio also said of the subsidies, “They’re not free enterprise capital funds, and that’s what we need.”
That segued into a mention of Carl Icahn’s vow not to invest $100 million in his Trump Taj Mahal casino after all should voters approve the referendum. That’s a burr in Caputo’s saddle, so he interrupted by calling Icahn’s comments a “threat” and zinged Icahn for the cutback of benefits for employees there.
Assembylman Raj Mukerji, who represents Jersey City, said of Guardian: “I don’t envy him, and I hold him in high regard.” He also said analysis suggests Atlantic City’s casino industry, already down more than 50 percent vs a decade ago to $2.4B, will drop below $2B by 2020.
Mukherji may have had the most clever line of the night, dismissing a suggestion that a North Jersey casino plan just amounts to a cannibalizing “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Instead, Mukherji referenced the Governors of Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut: “We’re robbing Tom Wolf and Andrew Cuomo and Dan Malloy and others to pay Paul.”
As for traffic concerns raised, Mukherji pointed to (presumably meaning the Dan Fireman $4.6B casino proposal at Liberty National Golf Club) the use of ferries from Westchester County, Long Island, and “the five broughs” of New York City.
Finally, Betty Lewis of the NAACP in Atlantic City blamed Governor Christie’s support for the ill-fated $2.4B Revel casino (2012-14) as exacerbating the city’s woes.