The NYS Gaming Facility Location Board released its Report and Findings on its casino selection process yesterday, February 27, 2015.  In four decades of reviewing reports by government agencies as an attorney and/or an interested citizen, I have never seen anything quite like this one:

1. The Location Board tells us what was wrong with the other Applications, but
2. Does not list any of the weaknesses of the selected Applicant, Rivers Casino at Mohawk Harbor, and instead
3. Uses the assertions, projections, and promises — untested — of the Applicant as its Findings.

The Schenectady Gazette produced another of its cheer-leading articles today, in the piece “Report: Schenectady casino won on location, operator’s record,” by Haley Viccaro, Feb. 28, 2015.  This Comment at the Gazette website contains my response to both the Gazette article and the Location Board Report:

Comment by dgiacalone:

This is a most peculiar Report by a government Board. From its introductory “Disclaimer” page, we learn that:

•  “In reaching its determinations, the Board has relied on the actual information or material submitted in [each] application.
• “To the extent that this report contains any errors or omissions, the staff is solely responsible for such errors or omissions, and such errors and omissions are not findings adopted by the Board.” [note: This is a new one on me: “If we made a mistake, it is not our finding, and our staff is to blame” is an attitude that makes it hard to take these people seriously.]
• “For the vast majority of Applicants, the results of the consultants’ estimates [of gaming revenues] were substantially lower than those of the Applicants.”

While the Board states the negatives of the other applications, it accepts all the Rivers Casino numbers, projections, promises at face value. The Report never mentions any of the opponents’ concerns over higher crime, proximity to Union College and the Stockade, traffic problems, impact on families, etc., much less explain why the concerns were not important. It also fails to explain how a site that already had a $200 million project, in a County that brags of its strong revitalization, meets the criteria of helping spur development.
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The state traffic experts did not make “findings”, as reported by the Gazette above, but merely “suggest” that the Schenectady Casino’s traffic analysis is “highly detailed with specific analysis of intersections leading to the site,” without finding that the Casino’s analysis is competent or the details plausible.
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Most telling, the Board simply counts comments pro and con, without considering the source or the strength of the arguments. It is hard to take the Location Board’s analysis any more seriously than we should take Rush Streets projections and its promises to protect the interests of the people of Schenectady. Like our City Council, the Location Board has, in its words, “relied on the actual information or material submitted” by the Applicant.

Click here to see excerpted pages of the Location Board’s Report and Findings, showing its Disclaimer page, the one-page discussing the Public Support demonstration for the Schenectady Casino, and two pages on that topic for the East Greenbush Casino proposal.

follow-up: Hey, we’re wondering how the Location Board could be so solicitous of bat colonies 5 miles from a rival casino site, but not even mention the treasured Stockade historic district, 0.5 miles away from Mohawk Harbor.  Maybe we also need to send spare eyeglasses to the Board members, who rejected other casino designs as “not inspiring”, but chose the extremely uninspiring Mohawk Harbor casino facility.