Let It Be
While Donn Esmonde goes off on a sarcastic rant about how great it is that the casino is (he says) not going to open, I have to say that my thinking on the casino downtown has morphed from ignorance to opposition to indifference. (As my dad’s joke goes, Q: What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference? A: I don’t know, and I don’t care.)
Does anyone think for a second that the Seneca casino won’t stay open or that the current hotel project is going to be halted? I strongly doubt it, because the Senecas will counter the request for an injunction by arguing that they opened their temporary casino and began constructing their property in good faith based on the government’s approval, and that it is they who would be irreperably harmed by a shut-down - not the casino opponents. In the meantime, the Senecas can go about an alternate procedure to ensure that the land can be used for gaming.
Although the Citizens for a Better Buffalo and CACGEC will continue to fight and oppose this casino project, and although the Margaret Wendt foundation will continue to fund the legal battle, I no longer care.
The casino won’t be a silver bullet for the city. It isn’t a great deal that Pataki negotiated for the city. It will engender even more litigation between the county and the city, who will compete for “host community” status under the compact. The casino won’t pay property taxes or income taxes to the state. It’s a crappy deal.
One of many.
Look at Niagara Falls. People like to point out that the area surrounding the casino is just as full of fail as it was before the casino came in. That’s true. But it should come as no surprise, since Niagara Falls has more than its share of fail. But at worst, it’s the status quo.
People don’t leave casino grounds to go for a walk around the neighborhood? What neighborhood? Where are they supposed to go? The dilapidated, crumbling, in-breach-of-contract Rainbow Centre acts as a physical and psychological barrier blocking pedestrian access from the Casino to the Falls state park. And what’s past there? After dark, not much. A balloon ride? Some street vendors? A gift shop? A crappy Hard Rock Cafe? At least the old, leaky convention center got fixed up and is used on a daily basis.
Will people leave the Buffalo Creek Casino? If there’s stuff to do, they will. Canal Side will be mere blocks away. It will feature hotels, restaurants, shopping, a boardwalk, etc. The Sabres play at HSBC Arena. A casino won’t solve a lot of problems, but it adds one more thing to do downtown. It adds a world-class hotel to add to options limited right now by a shitty, subsidized Hyatt and an Adams Mark that looks like it was airlifted from Cold War-era Soviet apartment blocks. (More concrete, Sasha!)
What’s done is done. The casino will undoubtedly be completed. The Senecas will make loads of money. People will come from near and far to check it out. The city will make money off the slot revenue. So will the state.
And so will the food distributors who employ people and pay taxes. So will the liquor and beer distributors who employ people and pay taxes. So will the people who live locally and work at the casino and pay taxes. So will the suppliers and construction workers and furniture wholesalers who will all make money off of this project. So will the architects and landscapers.
So, I’m now indifferent. If it’s blocked, great. If it goes up, great. Either way, my day won’t change. But if I’m leaning in any one direction, I’d say build the damn thing already. Build it nice, build it big, and build it in such a way so as to maximize pedestrian entry and egress from the property. By cooperating with the Senecas, we can help make it a project that is integrated into its surroundings, rather than an island surrounded by a sea of useless parking.
reflip Says:July 16th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Amen.
On the other hand, we could start, “Citizens for a Pedestrian-friendly Buffalo Creek Casino (If It Gets Built).”
Frieda Says:July 16th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Esmode talks out of both sides of his mouth. He Basically says Casinos are detrimental in a non tourist destination. But on the other hand he extols the slip and heritage architecture as a tourist magnet. If Buffalo can never be a tourist destination, then why waste money on a re-watered slip, or a Martin house.
Colin Says:July 16th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
“By cooperating with the Senecas, we can help make it a project that is integrated into its surroundings, rather than an island surrounded by a sea of useless parking.”
Is there any evidence that this is true? Why would the Senecas build their casino in a way that harms their interests, ie encourages people to leave and explore the area?
Buffalopundit Says:July 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
The Senecas have made a point to say what good neighbors they are. If true, then certainly they wouldn’t have a problem listening to community ideas concerning pedestrian access to the casino, and the example of Niagara Fallsview could be dangled in front of them.
Bill Altreuter Says:July 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act it doesn’t matter if the casino was built in good faith, or that operations have been ongoing– it is a pretty restrictive statute, and were I the Seneca I’d be concerned about the Federal Marshals coming in and shutting it down. If they are serious about protecting their investment, and sincere about being good neighbors, they will do what they did in NF. This is a city that could really use a first class hotel, and a first class meeting and convention center. We don’t really have either at the moment, but we could be developing a meetings business. The Convention and Visitors Bureau is, from what I can tell, poorly run. Despite this we have a pretty steady trade in regional meetings, and the Seneca could take this over and grow it without much difficulty at all. (In fact, a lot of that trade might not come to a casino– teachers groups, for example.)
Right now WNY’s tourist trade has well-established and well-developed attractions, but it does not have a hotel that an organization like the New York State Bar Association, for example, would be likely to book a meeting (as opposed to a CLE. We have plenty of places for that.)
Every mark that walks into a casino knows that the house always wins. Why Byron Brown and Chris Collins can’t figure that out is a mystery. This could be a win for everyone, but it won’t be if the Seneca insist on jamming gaming down Buffalo’s throat. Loads of studies establish that gaming ultimately damages the economies of the places that allow it. Even worse, as gaming becomes more common, the slight economic benefits that it does offer (low end hospitality jobs mostly, usually part-time) tend to diminish. Once there were two gaming centers in the US– now there are casinos all over. Increasingly they are not regional attractions– they are local entertainments, at best. What’s needed here is some leadership– someone to engage the Seneca, and work out a way for the area to get something it can use, and the Seneca can profit from, without taking us all for chumps.
Frieda Says:July 16th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Why would federal Marshall’s March in and shut the Casino down? They work for the Dept of Justice which is still reviewing the decision. And w/o trying to be repetative a Federal Judge in florida (Mickle) in rejecting a request for an injunction to stop class 3 gambling at a Seminole Casino, last thursday, outlined the federal protections granted to Indian tribes against interference from the courts.
“The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act provides clear and convincing evidence that Congress intended to preclude judicial review,” Mickle wrote. The federal government does have the right to prosecute and fine Seminole leaders if they operate illegal gambling on their reservations, according to Mickle, but a judge can’t make that finding or issue an injunction independently……. So now what?
steve Says:July 16th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Scratching my noggin over this one for a while, so maybe someone more familiar with this can help…if, as so many claim, this casino will attract customers largely from the region and the Senecas supposedly know that, why would they then seem to waste very large sums of money building a large, modern hotel?
I’m told the hotel they have in NF is doing a terrific business. Are they all locals who couldn’t make it home after a night of eating, drinking and gambling?
lefty Says:July 16th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Steve,
I have been debating this for a while and that is one hell of an observation.
Some days I just want to kick the anti-casino people in the head. Not because the numbers they have are 100% wrong but simply because of the real reason why they are fighting the casino. These folks simply want to tell people how to live their life. It is not about the law, it is about power.
The Senecas have sidestepped and out maneuvered the established power in the city. The small group of WASP’s that have run the show for so long simply can not stand being left out in the cold.
These folks talk about protecting the poor from gambling but have nothing to say about the MILLIONS in wages that will be lost by people who work really fucking hard at these casinos. Find the logic in that. Protecting the money of people who don’t earn it at the expense of taking money from people who work….. Only in Buffalo.
@Bill
I do not think anyone is ignoring the fact that the house always wins. IMO, what he is looking at is the big picture. So what if the house always wins? A fool and his money will always part.
The casino is about stacking the deck. It is about building a portfolio. of Buffalo.
I am going to NYC at the end of the month for a little vacation. I had intended to stay for only 3 nights but extended my stay for 4 after I started to plan what I wanted to do.
With the casino in play, people visiting Buffalo may extend a stay from 1 night to visit for a Sabres game (and maybe a Bills game downtown in 10 years) to a weekend. If the game is on a Fri, why the hell not stay to Sunday IF there is enough to do. If the game is on a Sat why not come in early on Fri and rip it up the night before?
People use the term critical mass when it comes to retail near housing. But the same term can be used for tourism. Buffalo is just a couple items away from being at the top of the second class. It will never have the attractions of NYC, Chicago or San Fran..BUT….it could be the best of the rest. Something it is not today.
Jeff Brennan Says:July 17th, 2008 at 10:59 am
BP - I hear you but one thing that keeps getting lost is that all government revenue according to the agreement goes to ZERO in a decade. That small share the city/county might get won’t be there for long and goes down every year from now until year fourteen. And we are in year 3 or something already.
@Steve - the 1000 jobs in the Buffalo Casino aren’t there yet so no one is going to be missing that if this gets stopped.
I just wish the proponents of Casino gambling would give up the moral self-determination argument and look at the basic econmomics of it. HAVE YOU EVER HEARD AN ECONOMIST FAVOR CASINOS??? No, because they are always a DRAIN
Jeff Brennan Says:July 17th, 2008 at 11:11 am
To finish:
…DRAIN where the majority of the dollars don’t come from out of the region. This one will be a regional attraction. Therefore dollars spent there are just not being spent elsewhere locally. No. Net. Gain. - just a slow bleeding of discretionary and non-discretionary dollars (hence the social problems like bankruptcy and embezzlement increase). If you aren’t an economist then you are just not well informed on the economics of casinos.
That being said - I AM INDIFFERENT OTHERWISE. Everybody has got one - why not downtown Buffalo. Nothing like joining the party late. It won’t do anything for us, but we can feel good about our collective selves because we have a CASINO. Buffalo will finally have arrived.
There is an upside though - even in my skeptical view. An impoverished indian tribe will get a bunch of subsidy money from our local economy and maybe that is a good thing… if spent wisely that is.
Chris Smith Says:July 17th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I just wish the proponents of Casino gambling would give up the moral self-determination argument and look at the basic econmomics of it
The opponents foist the moral argument upon us, so that’s the tack the discussion usually takes.
steve Says:July 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Jeff Brennan — I am not a proponent of casino gaming in any fashion, but I continue to ask a basic question — which you did not attempt to answer, apparently. If the Buffalo casino is intended or believed to be largely a local/regional attraction, why on earth would the Senecas spend tens of millions on a hotel?
I said nothing in my earlier post about jobs, but you’re argument that 1,000 jobs won’t be missed because they don’t now exist is, well, just silly. This 1,000 jobs was not an empty promise by a pie-in-the-sky developer. In nothing else, the Senecas so far have proven to be serious people with serious money that follow through on their promises. They promised 1,000 jobs, and their track record gives me no reason to doubt them.
We can argue about whether or not 1,000 jobs at a casino/hotel/entertainment complex is better or worse or even different than 1,000 jobs at, say, a microchip factory. But, no one has proposed the latter, and the former has (had?) a real good chance of being real.
lefty Says:July 17th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
@ Jon
The anti-casino argument is the Bizaro World version of the Pro-Silver Bullet project argument.
Look at how silver bullet projects happen. Say some people from Buffalo go to NYC and visit the Lincoln Center. They come back to Buffalo and say, We need one..we must have one. They show charts and provide documents on how much the Lincoln Center means to NYC. How many tourists visit NYC just to go there and how much money it brings into the tax base.
What they fail to see is how Buffalo is different compared to NYC. How they have hundreds of thousands of people who would rather spend $180 on a ticket to the Ballet instead of spending in on a Bills game. The project gets built and FAIL soon comes.
Now with the casino, people point to the FAIL in other areas. They point to the lack of spin off development in NF and claim the same would happen in Buffalo. Completely disregarding the fact that NF is more corrupt and mismanaged then Buffalo…if that is even possible.
They point to Detroit and say how it failed there. But they disregard that the newest Casino, the MGM, is only a year old. They also fail to see that Buffalo has a much larger regional population.
At the end of the day, a casino is NOT a silver bullet. It is NOT an end all be all solution. They should be viewed as a COMPONENT of a greater plan. Yet, the anti-casino folks judge them as a silver bullet. They never point out the variables outside of the actual casino, the lack of leadership by local officials and the overall mismanagement of the opportunity. They simply say, in a round about way, these areas fucked up and so will we.
I have yet to see a comprehensive plan by the CoB on how they will LEVERAGE the casino. This is what needs to happen. If this is done with full effort and then it is judged that the entire solution would not work, I would be ok with that. But this is not the case.
Lastly, if you or anyone else thinks the casino would only attract regional people, then you should also be in favor of ending ALL efforts to increase tourism. I would love to hear the argument on how spending $50m (most of it with tax dollars) renovating the Martin house is going to provide a spike in tourism but a 4star luxury casino resort will not. Or how a canal slip (once again costing tax payers MILLIONS) in going to bring people from far and wide but a $330M PRIVATELY funded 4star luxury casino resort will not.
If you or anyone else really thinks the casino will not draw people from out of town, Buffalo should just fucking give up and not spend a penny on anything to do with tourism. If people want to justify these things, make the formula based just on LOCAL dollars. If not then you are a hypocrite.
My personal opinion is the Casino will help the city in tourism if it is built. While they may not say it, I will help getting MORE events like the NCAA Frozen Four and BB tourney. It will attract MORE people to the Pond Hockey tourney. But it is NOT up to the Seneca’s to do the sales pitch. It is not up to them to do the OTHER items. It is up to Buffalo.
Brian Says:July 18th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Casinos are in the business of appealing to psychological weakness. Casinos are also about getting you to play with your money for money’s sake.
Think about that for a little bit.
Casinos ARE NOT a place that really makes much of an effort to give you your money’s worth in entertainment. Your money will, in all likliehood, last a lot less time-wise than you’d expect. Then, you either have your entertainment session abbreviated OR you start spending more than you had anticipated.
Hmmmmm. I wonder which of these scenarios is more problematic?
Fact is, a casino is unlike just about any other kind of business. It can be a tourist magnet for an area that already has great tourist appeal. However, when you have a struggling rust belt city, all a casino represents, is a giant wishing well, where people find themselves throwing in hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for unrealized expectations.
Introduicing a casino into the center of Buffalo is the same as introducing cancer into the gut of a weakened and vulnerable patient.
This may be the grandest mistake this city has ever allowed, and it will not be easily undone.
Jeff Brennan Says:July 19th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Steve and other supporters:
Well someone mentioned in a comment 1000 jobs and now that comment is gone. My 2 comments were numbers 13 & 14 and now with 3 more comments after mine there are still only 14 comments. Editing out I guess.
To partly answer your Hotel question: Do you know any regular gamblers up at Seneca Niagara? I do. They get lots of comp nights at the hotel. Presumably this is used as a loyalty reward as well as a way to keep the gamblers on site longer, like an extra day. I presume that a huge number of room-nights are used in this way. This in a place where there should be huge hotel demand do to the Falls and yet they are giving lots of room-nights away to local regulars. So the SIZE of the HOTEL doesn’t predict the number of out-of-town visitors. I am not saying there won’t be out-of-town visitors. They come here now without a “real” downtown casino. I am not privy to the hometown of the folks that stay at the Seneca Hotel in NF but chances are that even in that “tourist mecca” most of the people are still from our region (The Senecas have stated as much in federal filings for Bflo). As in: they would have spent their money somewhere else in the regional economy had they not spent it at the casino. The economic question is how many times does a dollar circulate before leaving the local/regional economy. Casinos have been proven to be less of an impact than other ways people spend money. This is the main question when it comes to a casino as primarily a local draw versus an international tourist draw (like Las Vegas). Here in Buffalo I can see non-local visitors dropping by the Casino and ending up in the proposed hotel. But how many of the casino patrons will book a trip to Buffalo for the Casino and stay in their hotel? I would guess, and you can disagree, that it will be a minority of the room-nights. And how many of those nights would be lost by another tax paying local hotel? Remember, the Seneca Casino pays less and less per year to state and local government until year 14 when it goes to 0%.
In summation, I don’t contend there is zero positive impact economically. But almost every credible study shows that on-balance, casinos are not a net gain. I still maintain that it will be good for the psyche of Erie County to have a world class establishment in a former/current ghetto (it is next to public housing still). And of course the Senecas will have money to help their people. I just don’t believe for a minute it will be a net gain for the regional economy.
Jeff Brennan Says:July 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Chris Smith - you are largely right.
Lefty - Yes you are correct in that many opponents make poorly reasoned arguments. You and I are not far off in the end. I feel the negatives will outweigh the positives and you feel the positives will be stronger while recognizing there are negatives. We can all argue about how the scale will come out. Everybody has an opinion but few have looked at actual numbers and almost nobody understands the complexities of economics.
WNYMind Says:July 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
The Wendt Foundation’s decision to spend $2 million on a lobbying effort against the Seneca, apparently with no grant application and review process, raises important questions about fairness of the foundation’s grant review process. If you have applied for funding from the Wendt Foundation and feel that your grant proposal was not treated the same way as CBB, you should contact the NY State Attorney General’s Office and file a complaint. Here is the contact information:
New York State Office of the Attorney General
Andrew M. Cuomo
Charities Bureau
120 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, New York 10271
(212) 416-8400 (phone)
(212) 416-8393 (fax)
The Wendt Foundation has never verified that their grant process was followed when CBB was given $2 million. According to the Wendt Foundation, CBB would have had to include the following in its application:
1) statement of problem project will address
2) copy of IRS Determination Letter
3) listing of board of directors, trustees, officers and other key people and their affiliations
4) detailed description of project and amount of funding requested
5)the last 3 years’ audited financial statements with above information.
I’d like to see the CBB’s audited financial statements for the last three years, and so would the Attorney General of NY State.
In essence, the Wendt trustees knowingly and intentionally ignored their funding rules and violated the law when they diverted $2 million to their lobbying effort and their lawyers. That’s clearly unethical and potentially a violation of civil and criminal law.
Buffalo Pundit » Blog Archive » Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions Says:July 29th, 2008 at 7:55 am
[…] is what I wrote earlier this month concerning my current indifference to the Seneca Casino in light of Skretny’s ruling: I have to say that my thinking on the casino downtown has morphed from ignorance to opposition to […]