Three of the 10 projects in the running for a New York City-area casino could be prematurely disqualified due to the state’s sluggish progress in starting time-consuming environmental reviews, those projects’ developers say.
The hangup, which has not previously been reported, affects three Manhattan bids — SL Green’s in Times Square, Silverstein Properties’ near Hudson Yards, and the Soloviev Group’s near the United Nations. All three are growing increasingly alarmed that the state Gaming Commission’s failure to begin environmental reviews for their projects will make it difficult or impossible for them to meet the Sept. 30 deadline the state has set for bidders to have their local land-use issues resolved, people involved with two of the projects told Crain’s.
“What has occurred here is a complete failure by the Gaming Commission to do anything,” said an attorney for one of the projects, who requested anonymity because they were criticizing the agency charged with doling out the wildly lucrative casino licenses. “They haven’t even started the process.”
Although the commission took some early steps last week to get the ball rolling, the three affected bidders still fear the snag could cut them out of the running for one of the three downstate casino licenses that the state plans to award by the end of 2025.
Given their sheer size, all 10 casino proposals must undergo monthslong environmental reviews under city and state law to study their potential impact. But because a few proposals also need special zoning approvals at the local level, the state is letting them kill two birds with one stone, with local agencies like the New York City Department of City Planning handling their environmental reviews alongside their requested zoning changes.
That leaves the remaining three projects in the hands of the state Gaming Commission. Until now, the mismatch seemed to give a slight advantage to Silverstein, SL Green and Soloviev, since they avoided the extra zoning-related political hurdles faced by the likes of Steve Cohen in Queens and the Related Cos. at Hudson Yards.
Now, the tables have turned: Projects with specific land-use issues like Cohen’s, Related’s, Thor Equities’ in Coney Island and Las Vegas Sands’ in Nassau County have their reviews completed or substantially done, with the help of local government agencies. But as the Sept. 30 deadline draws closer, the Gaming Commission, which is not accustomed to handling environmental reviews, has made little progress on the three Manhattan bids.
Attorneys for one affected bidder said it will be impossible for them to meet the deadline unless the state either delays it or changes the rules to require only a draft environmental impact statement by Sept. 30 rather than a final one. An executive working on a second project said meeting the deadline would be “doable but challenging,” and said they were preparing to submit concerns to the Gaming Commission.
Any further delays to the casino process would be unwelcome news to the developers and gaming companies that have been waiting impatiently for the process to get underway — and would cause headaches for the state, which is counting on raking in the casinos’ hefty tax revenues and license fees starting in 2026. The state’s decision to push the casino application process from 2024 into 2025 was done precisely to sort out the land-use problems that now threaten to delay things further.
Gaming Commission spokesman Lee Park said in a statement that “there is no delay facing these applicants” — although he acknowledged the time squeeze.
“The commission has been in communication with potential applicants regarding their environmental reviews and has developed a timeline that, while tight, will enable the consideration and completion of [State Environmental Quality Review] requirements,” he said Thursday.
Park shared a link to a newly created webpage where the state will publish environmental review documents for each applicant, but said the page was not created in response to Crain’s inquiry. The Gaming Commission webpage initially included a placeholder for Saks Fifth Avenue’s casino bid, but the mention vanished after Crain’s reported Thursday that that project had been abandoned.
New York’s environmental review process generally begins with developers submitting a draft scope of work to the government agency handling their project, which outlines the key points of their environmental impact study. After that scoping document is posted for public comment, developers and a third-party environmental consultant write a draft environmental impact statement — a lengthy study typically running hundreds of pages. They incorporate public comments into that draft and then publish a final environmental impact statement.
If that process began now, it would likely wrap up by December at the earliest, an attorney for one casino project said. On Wednesday, the Gaming Commission informed at least one of the affected applicants that the engineering firm LiRo had begun to review their planning documents, signaling that the process was finally beginning. Still, none of the three projects’ scoping documents had been published online as of Friday, and the state has announced no timelines for hearings.
Reviews for the non-Gaming Commission projects have taken well over a year. The city held scoping hearings for Steve Cohen’s Queens project back in December 2023, and for Bally’s Bronx proposal in June 2024. Cohen’s review was finally completed in February 2025, while Bally’s is still pending.
“Unless the schedule is changed or the Gaming Commission does something extraordinary to speed up the process, we won’t have a rational selection process,” said an attorney for one of the three jeopardized projects. “Because three of the important applicants won’t have even been allowed to run in the race.”
