As New York City Casinos Loom, a Catskills Community Fears for Its Future

Resorts World Catskills, one of the four casinos New York approved by constitutional amendment in 2013, was touted as an economic development effort that would create jobs and generate revenue for upstate communities through taxes and tourism. It opened in February 2018, and today it provides around 1,400 union jobs. The casino has generated just half the tax revenue that had initially been projected, but it has attracted tourists and boosted the local economy.

Now, as New York prepares to license up to three more casinos in the New York City area, locals worry that the already underperforming resort will lose customers. The busloads will dwindle, and the benefits the community was promised, they fear, will go with them.

New York Focus spoke with four employees at Resorts World Catskills, all of whom said there has been talk among staff about how the New York City casinos could impact their jobs. Sullivan County treasurer Nancy Buck said it’s a “huge concern” for the county. “It could be devastating.”

Resorts World Catskills did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

“I think we’re gonna feel a little punch,” said Bill Rieber, supervisor of Thompson, the 16,700-person town where Resorts World is located. “I think they really need to take a serious look at how they market this casino here for people to continue to be drawn in 80 miles out of New York City for something other than gaming.”

None of the prospective proprietors have yet submitted applications, a spokesperson for the New York State Gaming Commission told New York Focus, and there are no deadlines or projections as to when a downstate casino may be operational. One major state-run agency is eagerly awaiting the announcement: The Metropolitan Transit Authority anticipates using casino license fee revenue to fund badly needed repairs and other operations.

“The Gaming Facility Location Board’s [request for applications] makes it very clear that it will consider the impact on other gaming facilities as part of its deliberations,” said Lee Park, a spokesperson for the state agency.

The Genting Group, a Malaysian conglomerate that owns the casino, is already hedging its bets. Beyond its proposal for a Queens racino, Resorts World opened a new location in the Hudson Valley. It’s inside Newburgh Mall in Orange County and features slot machines, electronic table games, sports betting, and two bars. Rieber thinks Resorts World Catskills has already taken a revenue hit as a result of the Newburgh location.

“I’m watching the numbers,” Rieber said. “But it looks to me like they’re not growing.”

The prospect of a New York City casino pulling customers from rural locations has been a cause of worry since the casino legislation’s inception.

“[It was] a real concern, always,” Buck said. But she said the community needed the jobs. “We were really a depressed area.”

Casinos were touted as a solution. In the 1980s, signs that said “Casinos Mean Jobs,” a reference to recently legalized casinos in Atlantic City, lined Route 17. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, multiple attempts to bring in tribal casinos — the only ones permitted under state law until 2013 — failed.

Then, in 2014, the decades-long dream began to take shape when the state approached Sullivan County about casino site selection. Local leaders envisioned job opportunities and an increase in tourism, which meant an increase in customers at local restaurants, shops, and hotels.

They pulled together a team of local leaders, marketing experts, and lobbyists to testify about the former resort community’s need for the project at a state hearing. “It was the most overwhelming community support of anything I’ve done in 33 years,” Rieber said.

Rieber is still proud of the project today, he said, despite the casino delivering just half the local tax revenue it had initially promised.

Vegas-style casinos pay taxes in New York on house winnings. The state keeps most of the revenue for education funding, and the rest goes to local governments in the areas surrounding the casinos.

In a report published in August, the Office of the New York State Comptroller found that all four state-approved casinos failed to meet their initial tax revenue projections in 2019. In 2022, only one casino, Tioga Downs, had met its 2019 projection. The other three, including Resorts World Catskills, only attained 50 to 60 percent of their initial projections.

Three of the four casinos have received a combined $119 million in local tax breaks, according to data the Authorities Budget Office collects from local economic development agencies — nearly $53 million of which went to developers for Resorts World Catskills. The data is self-reported by the economic development agencies and has not been verified for accuracy by the Authorities Budget Office.

“They promise they’re bringing your locality revenue, they promise they’re bringing economic activity and jobs, and then the first thing they’re doing is saying, ‘In order to get us here, we want you to give us tax write-offs,’” Krueger said.

The state comptroller’s report pointed to multiple factors behind the lagging revenue, including two state policy changes: New York lowered taxes on money collected from slot and electronic table games in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and it authorized mobile sports betting, undercutting the practice in-house.

A new bill related to online gaming could further eat into in-house betting and reduce casino foot traffic, according to the state comptroller. Sponsored by Senator Joseph Addabbo, it would authorize online interactive gaming, meaning players could bet on games that are normally played in person at a casino. Online interactive gaming is already legal in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

Maria Doulis, a deputy comptroller, said that casinos should be scrutinized for their impacts on communities beyond tax revenue, including economic impacts on other sectors and social challenges.

“The increased incidence of problem gambling is something that the comptroller has really underscored as something that needs to be better studied and examined and understood,” Doulis said. “Because as these forms of gambling expand and proliferate, and there’s greater nexus to any single New Yorker, there is the potential for greater addiction to gambling.”

Assemblymember Ron Kim says that Resorts World’s strategy of bussing people in from Queens comes at the expense — literally — of his constituency.

“These are mostly low-income, poverty-stricken immigrants, and a lot of them are seniors who are literally just getting on the bus for a free ride,” Kim said, or to sell the $45 slot machine vouchers the casino gives them as a promotional incentive. If they do gamble, they’re often spending money they do not have.

“It seems like, for whatever reason, they’re exploiting this vulnerable side of our community,” Kim said.

On an August afternoon, in a set of shiny bleachers that seats 90, seven people are betting on the races: an older couple and a group of five boys who work at a nearby summer camp. Another 30 people are spread out on benches in front of the enclosed grandstand that now sits derelict.

“When it was here in the grandstand, it was like everybody was like family, almost,” says Donna Rodriquez, 68, who has been coming to the raceway since she was 13 years old and remembers when it was shoulder-to-shoulder crowded. She tries to attend every race to watch her grandson, who is a driver.

“Now all the casino does is put garbage and junk up there,” Rodriquez said about the old grandstand.

When Resorts World Catskills opened, it took over management of the Monticello Raceway, which was already an asset of Genting Group.

Robert Johnson, 48, a horse owner and lifetime resident of Sullivan County, said that at first, he supported the casino taking over. He changed his mind a year and a half later, when he saw how the casino was not maintaining the grounds.

“They think it’s a shithole,” Johnson said. “They want to close it.”

More than one thousand of the slot machines that occupy the Newburgh Mall casino were once located at the raceway. They were moved when the state approved Resorts World’s request to open an operation in Orange County. Rodriquez and Johnson said there has been less business at the raceway now that the slots are gone.

The harness racing industry has been struggling for decades, long before Resorts World came to Sullivan County. Still, Rodriquez and Johnson both said that if the raceway closes, hundreds of people will lose their jobs.

“No matter what, when you’re dealing with a big corporation, they don’t care what the community says,” Johnson said.