For sale: One casino, slightly used; Golden showers in LV

Pity MGM Resorts International. It owns half of the top-grossing casino in Atlantic City and can’t give it away. Yup, as many feared, investor Leonard Green has slinked off into the tall grass, leaving MGM with 50% of Borgata it can’t unload — perhaps not until 2014. Now that Green has half off the Palms, evidently the sheen if off of his New Jersey impulse buy. The screaming sound you hear is the asking price for MGM’s Borgata share falling to the ground. Boyd Gaming has made it pretty clear that it’s neither interesting in selling Borgata nor buying out MGM’s stake, so the lion’s going to need to take a big writedown. Have they tried listing it on eBay?

Pee party. Of course, back here in Vegas the buzz of the moment concerns the preponderance of piss in “daylife” pools. And the pissiest piscine belongs to … Tao Beach, with runner-up status awarded to Wet Republic (left). Congratulations, Las Vegas Sands! Thumbs-up, also, to Liquid at Aria, which managed to make the Top Five in its first year of operation. We now know for certain of at least one category in which that hotel behemoth isn’t underachieving. The Tao peeps say they’re on the case and we can swim with a clean conscience (or something). Test-lab descriptions of pool-party water [sic] range from untreated river H2O to “treated sewage effluent.”

Why does none of this surprise me? Given the behavior, inebriation level and general air of entitlement of the people who flock to dayclubs, the revelation that they’re relieving themselves in the Rehab pool (germiest of the bunch) is about as shocking as being told the sun rose in the east today. I cannot even feign outrage. Heck, if the douchebag-and-floozy crowd wants to procreate recreate in what’s basically an open-air sewer, that’s simply Darwinian natural selection at work, no?

Besides, as Deanna Rilling makes clear in her inimitably insipid fashion, American holidays are about daylife, liberty and the pursuit of … huge gazongas.

Penn-dulum swing. Executives at Penn National Gaming say they’re totally mellow about the prospect of competition from Cordish Gaming‘s Arundel Mills project (despite the underperformance of Penn’s own Perryville slot parlor). Gosh, makes you wonder why Penn went to such extreme and sometimes dodgy lengths to kneecap Cordish these last couple of years.

There’s even less cause to worry in Ohio, where Penn has agreed to the annexation of its Hollywood Casino site. Initially, Penn had wanted the perks of being in Columbus (like sewage removal, for instance) without the concomitant responsibility … i.e., tax payments. This, as you might expect, caused some small friction betwixt city and casino-to-be. To show that there are no hard feelings, Columbus’ city fathers are kicking in $15 million of tax abatements. That’s pretty darn “george” of them when you consider the massive financial concessions the company made to Gov. John Kasich. Penn’s obviously good for the 15 mil, given the craven alacrity with which it submitted to Kasich’s rapacious demands.

This entry was posted in Atlantic City, Boyd Gaming, CityCenter, Cordish Co., Current, Entertainment, Environment, Maryland, MGM Mirage, Ohio, Penn National, Sheldon Adelson, Taxes, The Strip, Tourism, Wall Street, Warner Gaming. Bookmark the permalink.