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Springfield Mayor Not Worried About Potential Casino Competition

An artist's rendering of MGM Resorts proposed casino in Springfield, MA
MGM Springfield
An artist's rendering of MGM Resorts proposed casino in Springfield, MA
An artist's rendering of MGM Resorts proposed casino in Springfield, MA
Credit MGM Springfield
An artist's rendering of the MGM casino-hotel planned in downtown Springfield.

The tribes that own Connecticut’s two casinos signed a partnership today to pursue developing a third casino to compete with the planned MGM Resorts casino in Springfield.

MGM has denied it might downsize the $800 million dollar hotel-casino complex planned in Springfield if faced with competition close by in Connecticut. 

Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno Thursday said he expects MGM to build a resort casino that will employ 3,000 people, as promised.

" I can't worry about what Connecticut does or doesn't do, " said Sarno. " I expect and I demand that MGM live up to their commitments."

MGM has filed a lawsuit challenging the new Connecticut casino law that authorized the tribes to seek locations for a possible casino.

The scheduled opening of the MGM Springfield casino has been delayed a year, until September 2018, because of the reconstruction of Interstate 91 in front of the casino site.

 The delay, approved by Massachusetts casino regulators, will cost the state an estimated $125 million in lost revenue

Copyright 2015 WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.

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