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Sands casino get expansion OK
ATLANTIC CITY -- The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority Tuesday took another step in the long-standing effort to relocate the Atlantic City post office as part of an expansion at the Sands.
The board agreed to let the Sands use more than $10 million earmarked for its share of the Boardwalk revitalization program and other projects to fund acquisition of two properties on Martin Luther King Boulevard between Atlantic and Pacific avenues: the post office and a restaurant.
These acquisitions will permit widening of the boulevard in that block, creating a four-lane road from Route 30 to Pacific Avenue.
In return, the Sands wants property not involved in the road project turned over for a future hotel expansion or development of an entertainment retail district. The casino hotel owns or is acquiring the remaining parcels involved.
At one point, the Sands dickered with a hotel tower and parking garage on the site of the post office at Pacific and MLK, but never went beyond conceptuals.
But with the recent acquisition of the former Traymore Hotel site along the Boardwalk, a tower will likely be built there, with parking on the post office location.
Even if Carl Icahn, the major stockholder in the Sands parent company, decides to sell the casino hotel here, a new buyer would likely focus on the Boardwalk package as well.
''The property the Sands seeks was always going for parking when they expanded,'' CRDA Executive Director Tom Carver said.
The feds are considering building a retail post office at Indiana and Atlantic avenues where a new Sun Bank expects to be located. A former supermarket site is slated for a mail-sorting and distribution center, said Nancy Wattson, chief financial officer for the CRDA.
Carver blamed the federal government for the snail's pace of finding another location for the post office.
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