The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Eric Heyl Column
By Eric Heyl, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Jul. 16–At the moment, the casino lobby isn’t very inviting.
Standing amid its decor of dirt and rocks, it was difficult to imagine the North Shore slots palace being completed in time for its planned opening in May.
That schedule seems impossible to meet, even if construction quickly resumes on the financially troubled project.
I drew that conclusion Tuesday on a tour of the casino site that I arranged myself. I did so by employing a time-honored journalistic tradition of showing up unannounced and walking through an entrance gate as though I belonged there.
I considered this maneuver relatively low-risk as any security personnel hired to shoo away nosy columnists probably had been sent home two weeks ago along with most of the rest of the workers.
The massive employee evacuation occurred after the project’s major contractors reviewed their dwindling bank balances and realized they hadn’t been paid since snow still covered the ground.
It was then that casino developer Don Barden was forced to make a sheepish admission: "Hey, you know that $780 million it’s costing to build this place? Funny thing — I don’t have it."
That was OK, though, because Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm was standing by to invest $120 million. All Barden is required to do to get the money is surrender control of the project.
Bluhm also is a significant investor in Philadelphia’s proposed SugarHouse Casino, which hasn’t broken ground because of political opposition to building it along the Delaware River.
That’s right. To get the Pittsburgh casino back on track, Barden turned to someone who can’t seem to get one off the ground across the state. That should inspire confidence in the local project among state Gaming Control Board members.
The panel has been asked by several state lawmakers to revoke Barden’s casino license, apparently because of some silly concerns that the guy holding the casino license won’t actually be the guy operating it.
From a distance, it appears as though nothing is happening at the construction site. The cranes used to hoist steel, visible from across the Ohio River, remain unmanned and still.
The place is hardly a ghost town, though. Inside the steel shell, perhaps two dozen workers were busy.
"It’s a skeleton crew, but we didn’t shut down completely," one of them said. He identified carpenters and electricians laboring away nearby before admonishing me for my lack of a hard hat.
For official comment, he pointed me to the Keating Building Corp.-Smoot Construction trailer at the far end of the construction site. There, I was politely told no one would talk to me and then admonished again for my lack of a hard hat.
City officials are counting on $5.3 million in casino revenues next year. As a solitary hammer echoed while I walked back to my car, I thought those expectations might well have to be lowered.
Eric Heyl is a Tribune-Review staff writer. He can be reached at eheyl@tribweb.com or 412-320-7857.
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