Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll take a look at what the vote to recommend licensing three casinos in New York City will mean for mass transit passengers. We’ll also hear what the patrolman who took Luigi Mangione into custody in Pennsylvania remembers about the arrest.
For transit watchers, the vote on Monday to recommend licensing three casinos in New York City was about something other than roulette wheels and dealers shuffling cards close to home. It was about guaranteeing new revenue for mass transit in New York.
The would-be operators of the three casinos have promised to pay more than $1.5 billion in one-time fees to the state if they become operational after receiving the licenses recommended by the New York Gaming Facility Location Board. The money would be another new revenue stream for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — the state agency that runs the subways and buses in the city, along with two commuter railroads — and must be spent on operating expenses like salaries for its 70,000-person work force.
But the M.T.A.’s employees aren’t the only ones who will have a symbiotic relationship with the high rollers. Like it or not, commuters will, too.
Rachel Fauss, a senior policy adviser for Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group, said the casino money would ease the pressure on the M.T.A. to raise fares, as it is set to do in January with a 10-cent increase for subways and buses, to $3 a ride. But she said that the fare was “much less likely to go up again when you’ve got this significant amount coming in from the casinos.”
The M.T.A. is counting on the casino license money in 2026, a year after it opened another new revenue stream, its congestion pricing tolling program in Manhattan. From January through September, the most recent month for which the agency has published figures, congestion pricing has brought in $507.3 million.
But that money cannot go toward operating expenses. The M.T.A. is required to spend the revenue from congestion pricing on capital projects like the Second Avenue subway extension in Manhattan and the Interborough Express light rail project in Brooklyn and Queens.
The transit agency is counting on spending $500 million a year from the three casino operators in 2026 and 2027 and $600 million in 2028. It will then look for tax revenue from the casinos. But Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, predicted that the M.T.A. budget would not be balanced in the early 2030s. She estimated the gap between its recurrent revenue and its recurring expenses at more than $800 million a year.
She also warned that if the gaming commission did not award all three licenses, “there would be a more immediate fiscal hit” for the M.T.A.
“We know now that each of those companies have said they’d pay $500 million for a license if they got one,” she said. “If one or two or all three don’t, that is a real fiscal challenge for the M.T.A.”
The vote by the facility location board was the next-to-last step in the long process toward licensing. The final decision will come from the state’s gaming commission, and it is widely expected to accept the location panel’s recommendations and issue licenses by the end of the year.
How reliable are the revenue projections for the casinos? That won’t be known until the early 2030s. Vickie Been, the former deputy mayor who was the chairwoman of the gaming location board, cautioned that the board’s review of the three applications found that all three had overstated their potential revenues from gambling and thus their tax payments. Consultants who advised the board concluded that the three operators could deliver $7 billion in gambling tax revenue over a decade, starting in 2025, less than what the companies had collectively projected.
Meeting the projections, or coming close, would make them the highest-grossing commercial casinos outside Nevada or Mississippi. But there could be a spike in revenues in the first year, followed by a falloff when people who had gone once did not return. Other cities have seen revenues decline over the years.
And Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University and a former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation, said the changing options for betting could also affect the M.T.A.’s take from the casinos.
“The gambling business is increasingly being done by people on their phones,” he said. “The question is, can casinos continue to be lucrative sources of tax money? We don’t know this because they’re now facing a vast explosion of sports betting, which is done on the phone, but there’s something about the casino that has endured, even with all the other ways of betting.”
Weather
Today will be sunny, with a high near 41. The evening will be clear with a low near 33.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Monday (Immaculate Conception).
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‘I knew it was him immediately’
Patrolman Joseph Detwiler recalled his reaction when a man browsing on a laptop in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., pulled down the surgical mask he had been wearing.
“I knew it was him immediately,” Detwiler testified on Tuesday in the Manhattan courtroom where Luigi Mangione’s murder trial will be held.
Detwiler was called by prosecutors who are arguing that evidence gathered when Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania should be allowed at the trial. Mangione’s lawyers say that the police violated his constitutional rights and that items removed from his backpack and statements he made should be inadmissible. Prosecutors have said that Mangione was carrying writings denouncing the insurance industry, along with a journal detailing plans for an assassination.
Detwiler testified at one of a series of hearings that began Monday. The proceedings are the first that Mangione has attended in State Supreme Court since the judge overseeing the case, Gregory Carro, dismissed terrorism charges in September. Mangione also faces a separate federal prosecution.
Mangione gave a fake name and showed a fake license when Detwiler asked for identification. Eventually he gave his real name. When an officer asked why he had lied, he responded, “I clearly should not have.” Video showed officers patting him down and finding a wallet with what Detwiler said was “a lot of money.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Night at the opera
Dear Diary:
I made it my practice to attend the opera whenever I made one of my frequent visits to New York from my home in Georgia.
One particular evening at the Metropolitan Opera stands out. As was my habit, I arrived early enough to get settled in and chat a bit with my fellow operagoers.
On this evening, “Rigoletto” was on the bill, as I recall. A nicely dressed older man was sitting to my left.
After a decent interval, I asked if he lived locally. He told me that he was from Philadelphia and traveled by train to attend performances in New York and then returned home by train each night.
As we chatted, he told me he had maintained a subscription with the same seat since the new house had opened at Lincoln Center in 1966.
He also said his advancing age had rendered the travel to and from Philadelphia more and more difficult and that he planned to surrender his subscription after that season. This performance, he said, would be his last.
We chatted a bit more about some of the great performers and performances he had seen until the chandeliers went up and “Rigoletto” began.
Throughout the evening, I found my thoughts returning to his love of opera and the way time can separate a person from the everyday pleasures that are essential to feeling at home in the world.
As the curtain calls ended and the applause died away, we stood up and shook hands. I thanked him for sharing his story with me. He nodded, turned and disappeared into the crowd filling the aisle and heading to the exit.
— Dan Funsch
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post The M.T.A. Is Counting on a Casino Windfall appeared first on New York Times.
