Big vote in Beantown?; Penn National short-sheets Maryland

That’s what it could come to in Boston, if mayoral candidate — and current Suffolk County D.A. — Daniel Conley gets his wish. Rather than simply letting East Boston vote up or down on Caesars Entertainment‘s proposed conversion of Suffolk Downs into a $1 billion racino, Conley would require it to get both citywide and local approval at the ballot box. It’s a position that enjoys two-thirds support amid the electorate, and two of Conley’s rival candidates quickly fell in line behind him. However, most of the opposing candidates still prefer keeping the vote local. Caesars’ chances look better that way: Conley calls himself a “casino agnostic” and early reading of the tea leaves suggests most Bostonians are, to0.

Further to the west, a pair of companies who plan to build amenities that are complementary to — but not redundant with — a Mohegan Sun casino in Palmer have released their designs. Our initial response can be boiled down to one word: tacky.

It only took two weeks for Station Casinos‘ venture into Internet gambling to get into trouble. (Why am I not surprised?) Station’s Ultimate Poker offshoot was doing business with Iovation, a player in the epic 2008 Ultimate Bet scandal — you know, the one where “hole cards” were being electronically spied upon? Online poker players, the true police of the industry, spotted the Station/Iovation tie-in and blew the whistle. So now the Nevada Gaming Control Board says it will look into what Station knew and when it knew it.

For a company that wants to expand along the East Coast, Penn National Gaming sure has an aptitude for sticking its thumb in regulators’ and civic officials’ eyes. The Washington Post reports that Penn tried to play Prince George’s County executives for dupes. While both MGM Resorts International and Greenwood Racing paid licensing fees proportional to the volume of slot machines they intend to have, Penn tried to have it both ways, paying for only 500 slots while intending to field 3,000. Although state gaming commission chairman Daniel Fry is adamant that the licensing fees are refundable, Penn is whining about a “gray area” that it claims could cost it most of the $18 million it is required to pay.

Penn would put 3K slots and 140 tables into Rosecroft Raceway. By contrast, MGM plans 3,600 slots and 140 tables for National Harbor ($21.6 million upfront) and Greenwood is thinking really big: 4,750 slots and 170 tables ($28.5 million). If Penn doesn’t want to spend money in the Free State, maybe it shouldn’t have blown $40 million trying to sandbag the rest of the industry in the last election cycle. Its chances of getting that racino license aren’t nil, I’d say. They’re subzero.