With or without casinos, Sullivan is moving on

By CHARLIE BUTERBAUGH

MONTICELLO, NY — Perhaps the most memorable statements fashioned at last week’s Catskills Casino Conference came during the St. Regis Mohawk Council Chief’s presentation.

Judging from what his tribe and Caesars Entertainment have done thus far to advance their proposal to build the Mohawk Mountain Casino Resort property at Kutsher’s, Jim Ransom said, “I’ve sometimes thought it might be easier to start a nuclear plant.”

Though Ransom said the St. Regis Mohawks expect to finish their land-in-trust application in a month and submit their full environmental impact statement to the Town of Thompson on October 13, Ransom has come to expect setbacks.

“While we hope the light ahead is the end of the tunnel, it could be another train coming at us,” he said near the end of his speech.

Though hopeful about state and federal approvals and optimistic about the economic benefits of casinos both for his tribe and Sullivan County, Ransom finished his presentation with an appeal to Barry Lewis, the Sullivan County editor of the Times-Herald Record, who argued in his September 23 column that Sullivan County needs to discover how to get itself out of the casino business.

“Don’t give up on us, Barry,” Ransom said.

The third annual conference arrived just a few weeks after two polls concluded that support for three new Catskills casinos among Sullivan County has dwindled to less than 50 percent. And while the Sullivan County Chamber of Commerce presented the conference as an opportunity for local businesses to “connect and cash in!” on growth opportunities set in motion by potential casinos and the newly built Mighty M racino, chamber CEO and President Jacquie Leventoff wrote in her introduction that the information of the day would help people plan for growth in the area “with and without casinos.”

In his presentation, Michael Sullivan, the former president of the county’s Partnership for Economic Development, pointed out that while Sullivan County has seen recent growth in small manufacturing and retail businesses, its economy has not yet reached “critical mass.”

He described job opportunities in the county as “one of the areas still wallowing in the backwash.”

“While there are lots of nine-dollar-an-hour jobs, we have not yet reached a critical mass,” he said.

To outline the potential benefits of three new casinos, Sullivan cited data from the Spectrum Gaming Group’s report, published last summer. The report concluded that three casinos would create 12,000 jobs that offer $28,000 average salaries and another 6,000 indirect and induced jobs. Sixty percent of these new employees would be expected to live within the county, the report states.

The casinos would also increase the number of tourists who visit the county annually from one million to 8.5 million.

However, the writers of the report argue that the county will need to plan its future and encourage non-casino businesses in order to “maintain a strong and stable economy.”

The focus of William Pammer and Mark Baez’s presentation at the casino conference was the county’s need to encourage other kinds of development.

Pammer, the county’s commissioner of planning and community development, said Sullivan County needs to move beyond gaming and tourism by creating a diversified economy and intensifying the multiplier effect, a term commonly used at the conference. The multiplier effect is thought of as the acceleration of the purchase of goods and services in the county, including anything from cars and housing to food and clothing.

Pammer said Sullivan County is currently losing over 30 percent of its potential retail sales to Orange County.

“We are hemorrhaging. We’ve got to close that,” he said.

Pammer and Baez, who serves as the CEO and president of the county’s Partnership for Economic Development, identified inter-municipal cooperation as a key to creating shovel-ready sites for commercial development.

“It’s key to involve towns in a discussion of where they want development to occur,” Pammer said.

At the conclusion of the Sullivan County Legislature’s April 2004 Spectrum gaming report’s executive summary, the writers turn metaphorical: “Just as a sculptor must work carefully with his or her materials of soft clay or a block of marble if something of beauty is to be created, so too casinos in Sullivan County will present an opportunity to create something good or even beautiful, but this outcome is not inevitable.”