CEO Caesars Touts Boston Casino Opportunity

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Saturday, September 28th, 2013 | Written by Charles Washington

There are several big name companies vying to be awarded casino licenses in Massachusetts, with Wynn, Caesars, and MGM all hoping to get a foothold in the Bay State.

With only one license going to the state’s largest metropolitan area, that of Boston, Caesars’ CEO Gary Loveman said this week that he views the city as one of the country’s most important future gaming centers, this according to the Chicago Tribune.

Company has teamed up with horse track

Caesars has partnered with Suffolk Downs in their bid to gain a casino operating license in the Boston area. The new resort would be located at the existing Suffolk Downs race track, which has been in existence in East Boston since 1935.

“We think Boston is one of the best opportunities in the United States. The only city in North America that receives significant high-end international play is Las Vegas. And in Vegas it accounts for a significant portion of the total. I believe Boston will become the second such city,” Loveman said.

Indeed, Boston is a city of international renown, and what’s more is that it is considerably closer to European centers than is Las Vegas, meaning a much shorter travel time for European gamblers looking for a U.S. gaming destination.

Boston is uniquely positioned to attract regional patrons as well, as it is only a short drive from many of the large cities of the Eastern United States. Whether or not the Boston casino doing the attracting will be the Caesars/Suffolk Downs one remains to be seen; Massachusetts regulators are expected to make their final licensing decisions this coming spring.

Caesars weighed down by nagging debt

One of the points that those who oppose the project make is that the company, burdened by a substantial debt load, may not be in a fiscal position to fully realize their plans for the development. The paper reports that Caesars’ current debt liability is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion.

Speaking to his company’s debt, a frequent topic surrounding Caesars, Loveman said he believed the company is in fine shape to see through with the East Boston project.

The debt, some of which has already been restructured,according to Loveman, should not hamper the company’s future plans nor lessen the impact of the Suffolk Downs property, which Loveman says will be “not quite on the same scale” as some of the elaborate Nevada resorts the company is famous for.

“We have $1.9 billion of cash sitting on our balance sheet, which is a tremendous amount of available cash for projects as they come to us, along with a number of other sources of liquidity,” Loveman remarked at a forum put on by the National Association for Business Economics.

Big name competition for sole Boston-area license

If the project jointly imagined by Caesars and Suffolk Downs comes to fruition, it won’t have been an easy road, nor one unoccupied by worthy competitors. The Wynn Company has also put forward a plan for a Boston casino, to be sited along the Mystic River in Everett, Massachusetts.

As part of the licensing process, Massachusetts gaming officials require that casino companies and the municipalities in which they plan to build reach what is called a host agreement, which then must be approved by local voters. A public referendum held back in June with regard to Wynn’s Everett plan was an overwhelming success for the company, whose proposed $1.2 billion resort received a more than 80 percent favorable vote from residents.

Wynn has also been in the news in other U.S. states – earlier this month the company announced a partnership with 888 to operate real-money online gambling web sites in Nevada and New Jersey.