Bid to build casino near Citi Field approved by neighborhood committee

Mets billionaire owner Steve Cohen and partners moved forward on Tuesday in their bid to build a casino near Citi Field.

The Hard Rock at Metropolitan Park won unanimous approval from a local committee for an $8 billion project, the fourth and final proposal still under consideration in a yearslong competition for three lucrative downstate casino licenses. The state Gaming Commission will award the licenses in December.

The three other bids are for Bally’s Bronx, at a golf course formerly run by the Trump Organization, and at MGM Empire City and Resorts World New York City, existing racinos that already have limited gambling facilities in Yonkers and Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.

Metropolitan Park would bring 5,000 slot machines, 375 dealer tables, and 30 poker tables to Willets Point, along with a 5,650-seat event venue and 1,000 hotel rooms. The project would be built on 50 acres the partnership says was mapped as parkland in the 1960s but only ever used as parking lots.

The redevelopment would include 25 acres of green space and a food court where some street vendors who now sell on nearby Roosevelt Avenue could do business. In total, the partnership says in filings on the state gaming commission website, it will invest $1.75 billion in "community needs including infrastructure, open space and parks" while creating thousands of jobs with an average total compensation of $140,000.

All six members of the Metropolitan Community Advisory Committee voted in support of the Metropolitan Park proposal in a lightly attended meeting at Queens Borough Hall where many of the attendees wore buttons or stickers that proclaimed "I support Met Park."

 "The Community Advisory Committee’s unanimous approval underscores the deep and broad community support behind Metropolitan Park," said Karl Rickett, Metropolitan Park spokesperson. "We are grateful for the opportunity to move forward in this process and be one step closer to making Metropolitan Park’s community-first vision a reality." 

The committee members include appointees of Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and elected officials for the area including State Sen. Jessica Ramos, a one-time casino opponent who said in an interview last spring that a casino "is not the kind of development my community deserves." Ramos could not be reached on Tuesday.

In an interview after the vote, George R. Dixon, a former Democratic district leader for the 35th district in Queens, said Ramos had not changed her mind but had told him to make his own decision. He said he voted yes because he believed a casino would bring jobs and make good use of "a space that had just been sitting there."

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr., who represented himself on the committee, made a similar argument before voting:  "Queens hit the jackpot ... Queens, get the money," he said, appearing to quote rapper Nas from the stage where committee members sat. 

Speaking later with reporters, Richards said he hoped the casino development would turn its neighborhood into a "cultural hub" while creating thousands of jobs, with treatment available for people with gambling addictions.  Cohen, he said, had succeeded partly because he had built trust in the borough. "During COVID, Steve gave us $20 million, straight into small business grants ... Citi Field opened for vaccination sites. There’s built-in trust for the organization."

Although upstate casinos have helped host towns reduce property taxes, none of the four casinos awarded licenses in 2015 and 2016 met their projected gaming tax distributions in 2019, and only one met it by 2022, according to the state comptroller. 

Memo Salazar, a filmmaker from Sunnyside who is co-chair of the Western Queens Community Land Trust, which has called the casino deal a "land grab," said in a phone interview on Tuesday the optimism at Borough Hall overlooked costs associated with gambling addiction and the loss of public land.

"It’s insulting, offensive, and disastrous to the economy of the area," he said. The promise of gambling treatment at the site, he said, sounded to him like "handing out a drug, then saying we’ll help drug addicts."