Casino news source: Pittburgh Post Gazette - http://www.post-gazette.com
Water park will be built near casino in Lawrence County
Thursday, September 06, 2007
By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau
HARRISBURG -- Lawrence County businessman Carmen Shick has dropped his plans to build a racetrack and casino west of New Castle, but he's by no means out of the picture as a developer.
After the state Harness Racing Commission yesterday chose Mr. Shick's competitor, Centaur Inc., to build a $430 million racetrack/casino with 3,000 slot machines on his vacant parcel along Route 422, Mr. Shick and his partners said they plan to build a companion project on adjacent land, headlined by a huge indoor water park.
"The water park will be 150,000 square feet in size, and will look something like the Splash Lagoon in Erie," Mr. Shick said, with water slides that twist and turn, "lazy lagoons" for floating on rafts, video arcades and other youth-oriented attractions.
"And that's not all," said Mr. Shick, whose family owns a construction firm, Premier Development Co., and a road building firm, Penn Ohio Road Materials. "We're also going to have a residential element to our development, with time-share condos and two hotels."
There also will be "a true Main Street USA atmosphere, with streets lined with retail stores and restaurants and lots to see and do." He said his project will expand the number of entertainment and tourism options for people who go to the casino and track.
"The key is to build what we call 'drivers' -- things that will attract high volumes of visitors and complement the gaming and racing activities,'' said Ed Tracy, one of Mr. Shick's development partners.
Lawrence County Commissioner Dan Vogler was on hand yesterday as the racing commission awarded the license to Centaur, which owns the Hoosier Park racetrack in Indiana and a casino in Colorado. Mr. Vogler said the racetrack/casino and the water park complex should give an economic boost not just to Lawrence County but to the region, including Beaver and Mercer counties.
Centaur officials said the racetrack/casino will generate about 1,500 construction jobs and 1,000 new full- and part-time jobs.
Mr. Shick, along with his brother, Ken Shick, and sister, Kendra Tabak, own the entire 550-acre parcel along Route 422. It's 55 miles north of Pittsburgh and near the Ohio line. The Shicks will sell 250 acres to Centaur for $75 million for the racetrack/casino and retain the other 300 acres for the water park, condos and retail.
For the past four years, the Shick investor group had been hoping to build a new harness track and casino to be called Bedford Downs on the 550-acre parcel. It's a nearly flat piece of land that has no environmental hazards and is ready for development. Mr. Shick's family has owned it for years.
At the same time, Centaur had tried to build its racetrack/casino, to be called Valley View Downs, on land about 25 miles to the south in Beaver County. It's a smaller, hilly site near Routes 60 and 51.
Under a deal crafted over the past month, the two developers agreed to settle their competition for the state's last harness racing license, which has dragged on for four years through numerous racing commission hearings and lawsuits before Commonwealth Court and the state Supreme Court.
The timing for the projects isn't known yet. Jeffrey Smith, chief executive officer of Centaur Racing, said the firm will immediately apply for a state slots license from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. Unless something negative is found in a background check of Centaur officials, the license could be issued in several months.
Mr. Smith is hoping the racetrack/casino will be open for business in 2009, attracting as many as 14,000 patrons a day when fully operational. He said patronage should be high because several million people live within 100 miles or so of the Lawrence County site.
Mr. Shick said the complete build-out can be done faster now than if one company were doing all the construction. He had estimated it would take at least four years for him to first build the racetrack/casino and then follow up with the water park, housing and retail.
With Centaur doing the track and casino and the Shicks doing the water park, "there will be a mammoth, fast-tracked construction project," he said, "with expected completion in half the time," or about two years.
The new racetrack will include eight barns with stalls for 172 horses along the backstretch, plus dormitory facilities for up to 100 horsemen. The track also will have restaurants, concession stands, an outdoor terrace, indoor areas to view the races and a theater for viewing races simulcast from other tracks, Mr. Smith said.
The new track will be one mile in length, the first mile-long harness track in Pennsylvania. That will allow for faster horses and more prestigious races, said Pete Spears, who breeds standardbred horses, the kind that race in harness races, at Hanover Shoe Farms in south central Pennsylvania. |
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