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Posted At : July 7, 2008 09:53 AM | Posted By : D McKee
Related Categories:
Regulation,Pennsylvania
Pittsburghers are getting even less casino for more money, thanks to a series of insidious changes made by Don Barden. He's proposed a 30% reduction in the building's height, even as he plans to tack another two stories onto the eight-story parking garage. The resultant grotesquerie should be self-evident.
Barden's comedic sidekick, Bob Oltmanns, was ready as ever with a thigh-slapper. Such drastic changes of scale, he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, were par of the course in casino construction. What a laugh-riot that Oltmanns! But seriously, folks ... when was the last time you can recall a casino being downsized so dramatically in mid-stream?
Casinos in the picture may be 20%-30% smaller than they appear.
As for Oltmanns' explanation that the shrinkage was forced by "air-handling loads," a source gives that short shrift, musing, "so now you size a building to fit an HVAC system, not the other way around." As for the water-table issue, "You would have thought building on the river (that really big wet thing for the boat docks that they want to pass on ... for now) would have given them a clue." Pittsburgh city planners found Barden's plans to be vague in the extreme and now it's obvious why: Barden & Co. evidently hadn't performed due diligence worth squat.
As you've heard, Barden wants to opt out of his promised amphitheater for now. Oltmanns sayeth it shall be, paid for out of evenutal casino revenues. Assuming, of course, that those revenues materialize in sufficient scope. And one Pittsburgh TV station has already run the numbers and found that Barden's $780 million pleasure palace is actually projected to lose money. Small problem, what?
Pennsylvania gaming regulators are stuck with a skeleton of a casino at the North Shore site. So even if they kick Barden off the project and re-bid it (with appropriately diminished expectations), his ghost will forever haunt whatever bastardized version of Majestic Star is eventually finished upon the foundations of Barden's Folly. It can't be said enough: Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh officialdom has no one but itself to blame for overlooking sundry red flags and approving this debacle.
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