There’s a new hot hand in the casino stakes

 

Mayor Lori Light foot pulled off a card trick last week in Chicago’s casino deliberations. Or maybe she dealt a new hand. Pick your metaphor.

In her administration’s announcement that it has winnowed the casino bids to three, she jostled the order of things and left at least one player at the table feeling pretty good, a player not Neil Blush.

It’s Blush who many insiders believed had the inside track on this. He still might. The chairman of Rush Street Gaming, which owns the Rivers Casino in Dee Plains that’s the most lucrative such operation in Illinois, Blush combines real estate development skills with knowledge of gambling, and his political and business contacts here are peerless.

Blush was behind two of the five initial bids for a casino site. He formed a strong local partnership to boldly propose taking over Lakeside Center, the oldest and least used convention hall at McCormick Place and the one needing the greatest amount of fixing up. Another bidder, Bally’s also turned in a plan to use other parts of McCormick Place property.카지노사이트

But under the city’s process, nobody was allowed to communicate with the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which runs McCormick Place. That was a problem. Last month, Lariat Clark, CEO of the authority, delivered a blistering critique of the proposals involving convention center property. Saying that all she knew about the casino was what she saw in the public proposals, Clark warned that the authority would need to spend maybe $1 billion to replace space if the meetings industry continues to recover from the pandemic. There was talk of bureaucratic hurdles, including a need to change state law, before any deal could be struck.

Clark conjured an image of delays and cost escalations for the city’s casino ambitions, stymied for most of the last 30 years. It took the Light foot team just over a month to respond.

It discarded the two bids involving McCormick Place. “M PEA and convention center business drives $1.9 billion of economic impact for the City based on 2019 events. Losing even one convention due to a casino could have significant adverse impacts on City and State revenues and jobs,” City Hall’s evaluation said.