NY governor against financial help for state’s casinos

Governor Cuomo said that he’s opposed to the idea of helping the state’s four new casinos as they continue to struggle.

US.- Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, said that he’s against bailouts for the state’s four new non-tribal casinos as they continue to struggle to bring revenue to the state. At least two casinos in upstate New York made a request to lessen the required payments to the state.

Last week, Rivers Casino & Resort in Schenectady had requested a reduction on the payments required to make to the state. Del Lago Casino and Resort in Seneca County made a similar request in the final hours of the state budget discussion.

However, Cuomo said that the four casinos have to operate under the terms of their agreements. “The upstate gaming casinos are private concerns. They bid, they made an investment and some of them will say they’re not doing as well as they hoped or would have expected but they’re private concerns, and I don’t want to get into the business of bailing out private concerns,” he said, and added that the state welcomed casino gaming to create facilities, generate economic development to create jobs, and that “it has done that.”

“These facilities have done billions of dollars of construction and they employ thousands of people. So to that extent you have a casino saying ‘You know what… I’m not meeting my expectations, I should get help from the state,’ I’m not sympathetic to that,” Cuomo said.