Hey man, the Mets took the series from the Phillies and are playing the Braves. Stop asking questions!!!!
TheCity.NYC wrote about The Casino….some excerpts…
New Green Willets has paid $120,000 so far this year to Moonshot Strategies and Hollis Public Affairs to press city officials on Willets development, including a potential casino, lobbying records show. New Green Willets itself has also spent more than $98,000 lobbying City Hall and other elected officials pertaining to development in and around Willets Point — on everything from creating hiking trails along Flushing Creek to building more housing, along with the casino.
Of course to some people spending $98,000 is like you dropping a ten. Also the hiking trails are back!!!
The current plan is to build 1,100 units of affordable housing, new businesses, hotels and a new public school by the end of the decade.
Time out…
…yeah let me know when the affordable housing is done.
There are also nearly 40 acres of privately-owned land around Willets Point, but Cohen would have to buy that land out — and likely require more years-long environmental remediation before construction could even begin, experts said.
“Even if Steve Cohen succeeded in getting state alienation, and a casino license, the Mets will still need to comply with their lease agreements regarding the number of parking spots,” said a person familiar with the lease agreement.
“It’s not so easy to just say you want to build a casino in a city parking lot.”
Oh and this is fun too…
In the deal hammered out by former owner Fred Wilpon in 2006, QBC agreed to maintain more than a dozen parking lots in and around the stadium in connection with its approximately $650 million bond financing, according to officials with the EDC and documents reviewed by THE CITY.
The lots include those spaces around the stadium as well as ancillary parking lots inside Flushing Meadows-Corona Park that are used for railroad commuters and for other events, including the U.S. Open, according to the financing deal.
A 2017 audit by then-comptroller Scott Stringer found the Wilpon family had underreported the amount of the previous year’s revenue from managing parking lots by nearly $300,000, out of about $8 million total.
Anyway, there is a lot more to the article in TheCity.NYC and I encourage you to read it!
One person familiar with the original deal noted that it could be possible to get around the lot space problem by building stacked-level parking.
And think about how easy it is to get out of Citi Field’s lots now….then imagine the X years where it’s a construction site….and then the fun of leaving the game from a tiered parking lot. Ever do a Yankees game?
“Steve views owning the Mets as a civic responsibility, and has made investments in the team, the ballpark and the community his number one priority,” Tiffany Galvin-Cohen, who is not related to the Mets owner, told THE CITY in a statement.
Maybe Steve will build us the hiking trails even if he doesn’t get a casino? It’s a civic responsibility right?
