Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming August 2014 18 Cover Story Three years on, the company has a better grasp of the complexities of the Florida political environment. Veteran GOP lobbyist Brian Ballard has been hired to polish its image in Tallahassee. Alliances have been secured with the construction trades and business groups in South Florida. But local support is cooler now than it might have been in those darker economic times. Not that it was ever unanimous to begin with. Many in the community object to the proposed scale of Resorts World Miami in relation to the rest of downtown. Traffic is another big concern. “In the initial months, we were excited about the investment they were doing,” Mr Regalado recently told the Herald . “I now think a major casino is a very bad idea for downtown Miami.” He is not alone among officials waiting for Genting to elucidate an alternative plan for the Herald and Omni sites. Publicly, the company has flashed glimpses of various hotel, residential and shopping projects designed to fly below the public hearings and City Commission debates a major zoning change would require. “We are still refining the design and composition,” Genting Americas said in a statement attributed to Christian Goode, senior vice president of development. “We still envision a mixed-use project with multiple towers offering fantastic views of Biscayne Bay, great waterfront dining amenities and superior high-end retail outlets.” Beyond this it hasn’t done much except to chip away at pieces of the old Herald building (it has promised to demolish it in the fall) while it tries to figure a way to work a casino onto the site outside the legislative process. Fifty miles off the coast, in the Bahamas, the company is adding a 340-room hotel to its small casino (10,000 square feet) at Resorts World Bimini, which opened last December, and has commissioned a 32,000-ton cruise ship to ferry players there from the Port of Miami. But bigger plans are in the works for the Herald site in the form of a joint venture between Genting Malaysia, the Kuala Lumpur-listed company that oversees most of the group’s gaming interests in the US, and the owners of Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino, which runs a nationally known thoroughbred track in Hallandale Beach in neighboring Broward County that houses 850 slots, 20 poker tables and holds a second, dormant casino license Genting wants to transfer to Biscayne Bay. It’s a longshot, but no shortage of thought has gone into it. The idea is to steer clear of the Seminoles’ compacted monopoly on live tables with a casino offering only machine games, 2,000 of them, and off-track betting, and gain political support by dedicating a portion of revenues to purses at Gulfstream Park and a portion to a non-profit company to benefit the Florida Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association and the Florida Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association. A report by Singapore brokerage UOB Kay Hian says the casino Source: Nevada Gaming Control Board, HVS Table Games Revenue (Excluding Baccarat) Baccarat Revenue TABLE GAMES REVENUE (EXCLUDING BACCARAT) AND BACCARAT REVENUE (2004 TO 2013) LAS VEGAS STRIP $72 MILLION AND OVER MARKET $4,000 $3,500 $3,000 $2,500 $2,000 $1,500 $1,000 $500 $0 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 >> Prime real estate—Miami’s Biscayne Bay