Like its predecessors at Revel, management at Brookfield US Holdings found itself with an albatross around its neck: the cost-intensive Inlet District Energy Center. The 
standalone power plant cost the resort $1.25 million a month. Brookfield hoped to reduce those costs but couldn’t. The interest rate, 12% on bonds and as much as 18% on equity, was too onerous. The bondholders want to be paid what they were promised when the plant was built and Brookfield evidently doesn’t have the scratch. Finding Revel too rich for its blood, it’s scrapping the purchase.
Spurned Revel bidder Glenn Straub, who’s been challenging the outcome of the bankruptcy auction. was quick to take credit. “Obviously they couldn’t, they knew we were going to win [our appeal], that it was going to be reversed anyway,” he told The Press of Atlantic City. He says he’s still interested and has at least $95 million to approve it.
The plain-spoken Straub says he’s been flying to Atlantic City twice weekly and is trying to compile a shopping list of 10 properties. (He lost out on the Showboat, though.) “Straub said Wednesday that he wants to run a roughly 250-acre complex for equestrian and extreme sports in or just outside Atlantic City,” reports The Press, which collected choice Straubian quotes about “elevator-equipped artificial mountains” and “high-speed catamarans,” all of which made him sound like Howard Hughes on espresso. “Crazy” was his word for Atlantic City’s four-months-a-year business cycle, followed by eight months of semi-hibernation.
Anyway, he seems not to be taking himself too seriously: “It will be a nice little hobby for us to put 10 years of our life into.”
* Friday’s meeting of the New York Gaming Facility Location Board will be the last one before casino sites are chosen. Wow, the process was flown by quickly. New York has accomplished in months what it took Massachusetts years to do. The Empire State grapples with casino selection at a time when the industry is described as “tumultuous,” contracting in Atlantic City and expanding in Massachusetts, while in Pennsylvania … well, we’re not entirely sure what Pennsylvania is doing.
According to a Gannett wire service story, the five criteria being weighed are “how fast
a casino could open, the tax revenue it could bring in, the jobs it could create, the impact it could have on other existing casinos, and the ability to finance the project.” I 
strongly suspect those are in roughly descending order of priority (especially with Caesars Entertainment a heavyweight contender), with #2 holding particular fascination for state officials, I’ve no doubt.
Although the Facility Location Board could easily screw it up, that’s not a given. “You can build something that’s profitable,” says Moody’s Investment Services analyst Keith Foley. He explains, “It depends on what they build and what the expectations are and what the return profile is.” Still, if the selection board goes with a category-killer like Genting Group‘s $1.5 billion Tuxedo proposal, it could have a crushing effect on everyone else in the remote vicinity. (New York already has nine racinos and five tribal casinos scattered across the state.) Considering the amount of revenue Genting is making at Resorts World New York, it’s a good question why you’d give the company with the most goodies another one or two huge slices of the pie.
* Now that Scott “Woody” Butera has restructured Foxwoods Resort Casino‘s debt, he’s bowed aside to go run the Arena Football League, of all unlikely things. 
Foxwoods needs an operations guy now and it made a great choice, too: Felix Rappaport, late of Luxor and The Mirage. He was exiled from MGM Resorts International as part of a larger executive shuffle, but I figured he had a lot of miles left on the odometer. According to The Associated Press, “Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler said Tuesday that Rappaport’s vision has been the driving force behind a plan to expand with new attractions, nightclubs and restaurants.” I’ll be looking forward to see what that vision turns out to be.
Leon Thomas, latterly the managing director of European online-bingo operation Tombola will be getting a change of scene. He’s coming to Las Vegas, where he’ll be general manager of Caesars Interactive, reporting to Mitch Garber and riding herd on strategic initiatives, among other duties.
