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Investing In Trump Was Always A Loser

If all goes according to plan, someone will have the honor of blowing up the crumbling remains of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. It could be you. Atlantic City, which loves Trump not, is taking bids on who may push the button.

"This will be done remotely and can be done anywhere in the world as well as close to the Plaza as we can safely get you there!" the auctioneer Bodnar's promises.

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Christie Announces Atlantic City Takeover

Christie Announces Atlantic City Takeover

By Jonathan Lai and Maddie Hanna, The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)

TRENTON, N.J. — Back from the campaign trail, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a plan Tuesday for the state to take control of Atlantic City’s finances.

Christie, flanked by Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat, and Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian at a Statehouse news conference, said “all three of us up here agree” that greater state involvement is needed in Atlantic City, which has been rocked by a series of casino closures.

Under new legislation, the state will get the authority to restructure municipal debt, amend or terminate city contracts, and consolidate or share municipal services with Atlantic County or other towns, Christie said.

Asked whether the actions amounted to a “takeover,” Christie said: “You can call it whatever you want to call it.”

Notably absent from the news conference was Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, a Democrat.

“I will review any proposal to help Atlantic City, but I will be especially concerned about any effort to unilaterally alter collective bargaining agreements,” Prieto said in a statement. “The fact is that no one speaks for the Assembly except for the Assembly. If the Assembly is not involved, then there is no agreement.”

Christie said his office would work with Sweeney and Prieto to try to pass legislation in February.

If the state’s “expanded responsibility” measure passes, it would last for no more than five years, Christie said. It also could help delay further talk of bankruptcy, which city officials had been set to discuss at a council meeting Tuesday afternoon.

“That is clearly not my preference; it’s not the Senate president’s preference, and it’s not the mayor’s goal,” Christie said.

Still, Guardian said, “it would be foolish to say that anything is off the table — including bankruptcy,” which he and Christie described as a last resort.

Guardian said local officials had opposed a state takeover, “but the reality is very clear.” Atlantic City’s finances, he said, are in a “structural deficit” that even bankruptcy would not solve.

“We’re not dead,” he said. “We’re just wounded.”

As for his relationship with Guardian — whom Christie accused last week of not having the “guts to do his job” — “we’re working together now, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Christie said.

Referring to a comment by Guardian earlier in the news conference, Christie said: “I think he called it kumbaya. I’ll quote the mayor.”

©2016 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Governor Chris Christie speaks during the Fox Business Network Republican presidential candidates debate in North Charleston, South Carolina January 14, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane

 

Casinos Just Aren’t The Answer

Casinos Just Aren’t The Answer

The video for the Bruce Springsteen song Atlantic City opens with a scene of the grand Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel imploding into a pile of dust. That was almost 40 years ago. The Traymore Hotel and other grand hotels were leveled in much the same spectacular fashion.

In their place rose glass boxes and concrete hulks to house new casinos. The Atlantic City dream was to fill New Jersey state coffers with gambling gold.

At the time, Nevada held a monopoly on casinos. The plan was to turn Atlantic City into a Las Vegas East drawing rollers — high and low — preferably from other tax jurisdictions.

But that dream went bad all around.

At least four Atlantic City casinos are closing this year, in part because of intense competition from newer gaming establishments in nearby Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Another problem for casinos nationally is the tough economy for their core market — blue-collar and middle-income workers.

Casino revenues in New Jersey are down 44 percent from their 2006 high, but the business is rough everywhere. The huge Harrah’s in Tunica, Mississippi, has also shut its doors.

The casino business is now in the advanced “cannibalizing” stage as competitors eat what’s left of each other’s lunch. By “competitors,” we mean both the casinos and the states relying on their revenues.

Atlantic City’s special tragedy is what was traded for the casino fantasy. Nowadays cities run entire visitor campaigns around the sort of fabulous old architecture Atlantic City so easily discarded. Imagine what today’s entrepreneurs could have done with a mythical beach resort smack in between New York and Washington!

Casino lust persists, but the argument has changed. Casinos are rarely portrayed as a font of tax revenues from out-of-state pockets. In most of the country, casino customers are increasingly locals who would have spent their spare dollars at local restaurants, theaters and other entertainment venues.

The new sales pitch for casinos rings more of desperation: If the state’s working class is going to be milked by gaming conglomerates and the states that tax them, better that the milking take place at home than in a neighboring state.

Some states have valiantly managed to hold the line. Nebraska, for example, does not allow full-fledged casinos even though Iowa has placed three in Council Bluffs, right across the Missouri River from Omaha. (Iowa’s gambling tax revenues are also falling.)

Massachusetts seems to be succumbing and is now involved in an odd negotiation with Mohegan Sun, an Indian casino operator applying to build an outlet near Boston. Mohegan Sun already has a big-league casino in eastern Connecticut, not far from the state border. Massachusetts wants a promise that it will not entice the state’s high-stakes gamblers to its flagship in Connecticut (where casino taxes are lower). Mohegan Sun has yet to agree.

The statesmen running New Jersey now figure: If casinos aren’t making it in South Jersey, perhaps the solution is casinos in North Jersey. How about putting them “somewhere in the swamps of Jersey” — a Springsteen reference to the Meadowlands?

The Meadowlands sit a mere nine miles west of Manhattan, a casino-free zone. New York state, however, seems to have its own plans. It is now considering several industrial-strength casinos just north of New York City (and, for that matter, the New Jersey state line).

Jersey’s casino boosters seem undeterred. A North Jersey state senator — mindful of South Jersey’s fear of new competition — recently ventured that a couple of big casinos in his part of the state “could produce in excess of $1 billion over 10 years to be reinvested in Atlantic City.”

Sure. If you say so.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Bob Jagendorf via Flickr

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In Atlantic City, Revel’s Casino Stutters To A Close

In Atlantic City, Revel’s Casino Stutters To A Close

By Amy S. Rosenberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — In the end, the Revel ball did not roll off the tower into the ocean, and no buyer emerged in the middle of the night to save the day.

Instead, Revel merely unraveled through the night to an anticlimactic pre-dawn closing of its moribund casino floor. Employees of Ivan Kane’s Jelly Roll Burlesque Club held a stubbornly spirited after party as remaining on-duty dealers watched from emptying tables, waiting to inventory final stacks of chips.

One supervisor put fingers to his own head like a gun and rolled his eyes. An off-duty employee walked around barefoot. A bartender went in for a long private apology to a burlesque dancer.
By 3 a.m. the mood as the casino threw in its $2.4 billion towel dissolved into a boozy revelry of futility. Like the value of the casino itself, bartenders hawked bottles of booze for pennies on the dollar.

“It’s a sad and bittersweet thing,” said one bartender on her way out for good.

The hotel portion had shut down Monday morning.

It was the back end of a one-two Labor Day weekend punch of casino closings in Atlantic City — the beloved and familiar as family Showboat on Sunday afternoon, the steely and oblivious as a bad boyfriend Revel at 6 a.m Tuesday. The closings left some serious bruising.

“It was just a debacle from day one,” said Cesare DeLeo, sitting out on the Boardwalk with a group of fellow bartenders during a fire alarm evacuation of the place around 1 a.m. that everyone took in stride, like it had happened many times before.

The group stared up at the already-shuttered 57-story tower looming before them, and the closed Showboat barely visible in the 1 a.m. darkness.

Some wondered if the pulled fire alarm might end it all right there prematurely, in a typically underperforming kind of Revel way. But no, they were summoned back inside, if only for the final four hours.

And so the darkest hour was indeed just before the dawn Tuesday as Revel painfully and maybe even pathetically closed its doors not long before the sun rose out over an indifferent Atlantic Ocean.

“I have a feeling we’ll be back,” said bartender Sven Stevenson, 25, who presided over the after-hours party at the bar of Ivan Kane’s Jelly Roll, just to one side of the casino floor. At first drinks were $5; by 3:45, bottles were being sold for a few dollars. Remaining patrons walked around with several bottles on each arm.

At La Dolce Vita, a third party restaurant, an employee cleaning up said the company’s three restaurants were not packing up. They are counting on reopening under new owners, he said.

Dancer Donna Yana, originally from Russia, danced on the Jelly Roll bar and catwalks off the casino floor, and others took their turns posing with her. She has a new job at Providence at Tropicana. “I just love this place,” she said, of Revel. Like many, she hopes she will return.

“It’s been a roller coaster ride,” said Katrina Wilson, a table game supervisor who left Showboat to work at Revel. She chatted with two colleagues from Showboat, who had just arrived from a party held at the Steel Pier for them. None had new jobs as yet.

Gamblers stayed at a dwindling number of table games and slots throughout the last hours, with no apparent good or terrible fortune accruing to them or the casino. “I’m putting $10 here, $10 there, all my favorite machines,” said Doug Linton, who said he was a Black Card holder. Retired nurse Bernadette Steuver, gambled away $500 in a slot machine. “I donated to the cause,” she said. Paul Skladany won $2,000 at blackjack and quit, as he had boasted to friends he would.

Revel’s HQ Beach Club, like a perfectly fine sear around an undercooked piece of steak, ran out the clock on Labor Day with an appearance by DJ Steve Aoki, which lasted after the hotel itself shut down around check out time, 11 a.m. Employees, wearing #HQStrong t-shirts, walked out later arm in arm, some dancing through the casino floor.

Perhaps it was fitting that the casino floor was left as the afterthought to the death of Revel. The casino was from the start described as incidental to the overall business plan of Revel, whose management conceived the enormous structure as a high end, edgy, fast-track resort first, and a casino second.

Revel’s bust was marked by other ironies throughout the weekend. The Hooters gave a weakish ukelele version of Atlantic City during Revel’s final weekend, offering up the closest thing to hope in the worn Springsteen line “everything that dies some day comes back.”

A lady who got famous trying to bring gondolas to Atlantic City in 2009 was back on the Boardwalk insisting she had offered $50 million to Revel’s owners to keep it open.

And the steel letters of Revel on the Boardwalk facade — no such lettering ever appeared on the tower, as if the place was too cool to identify itself to the masses — were pried off the tiles of the facade, first apparently by souvenir hunters, then not long after by Revel employees.

Out on the casino floor, the lyrics of Heart underscored the feeling of puzzling futility many customers and employees felt at the closing of this brand new resort. “Try, try, try to understand.” At least during these hours, when what felt like a perfectly nice resort sputtered to oblivion, as dedicated custodians swept and polished and hauled away trash, it seemed pointless.

Photo via WikiCommons

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