BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
“Does anyone in your household engage regularly in gambling, betting, sports betting, or other kinds of wagering?”
Queens residents were asked this question and 80 others relating to their thoughts on Steve Cohen’s $8 billion Metropolitan Park casino project in a poll sent out on August 20th that has puzzled some residents, who’ve called it biased toward the casino and have wondered why they were receiving it after the project had already been approved.
Metropolitan Park spokesperson Karl Rickett did not respond to requests for comment by press time and the Queens Ledger was unable to verify whether the poll was sent on the behalf of the development team. But the poll — sent via text message by a company called Bedrock Polling — comes on the heels of a flurry of pro-casino mailers, and a similar poll sent to Flushing and Corona residents earlier this year, leading some to speculate that it’s part of an attempt by developers to assuage mounting criticism of the project.
“I’m thinking, ‘why are they polling me now?” said 25-year Corona resident and Queens Community Board 3 member Celso Garcia. “After they already did everything and got all the licenses. Why was I never asked about it when it was first proposed?”
Expected to open in 2030, the Metropolitan Park project will see a Hard Rock Casino, a park, and an entertainment district with restaurants and a hotel built on 78 acres of land near CitiField in Flushing, as well as improvements to the Mets-Willets Point subway station. It was approved by the New York State Gaming Commission in December, the conclusion of a yearslong approval and engagement process that saw dozens of public meetings and 16 community workshops, ultimately resulting in overwhelming approval from six Queens community boards, the New York City Council, and both chambers of the New York State Legislature. Construction was initially set to begin this spring but has faced months of delays, though developers have maintained that the complex will open by 2030 as originally planned.
But despite the project’s political support, many Queens residents in Corona, Elmhurst, Flushing and Jackson Heights have long criticized the casino portion of the project over public health and displacement concerns. They’ve also alleged that the community engagement process was rigged in the developers’ favor, with dissenting voices silenced by cutting meetings short and packing community board and community advisory committee meetings with pro-casino voices. Critics filed a lawsuit in March seeking to halt the casino’s construction, alleging that the public engagement process did not follow State regulations. On August 17, meanwhile, the City’s Public Design Commission grilled Metropolitan Park architects over their plan’s insufficient public space and for adding an additional, unapproved hotel tower.
Several sources in Corona and Flushing confirmed they had received the poll, though the Queens Ledger was unable to confirm how many total residents had received it.
Bedrock Polling, meanwhile, could not be reached for comment. The company’s website describes its services as “full-service opinion research.”
The August 20 poll begins by asking participants to rank their favorability of Steve Cohen, and regional politicians Julie Menin, Grace Meng, Donovan Richards, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, before asking “Do you generally think things in New York City are headed in the right direction, or are they on the wrong track?”
Participants are then asked if they’re familiar with the plans to “build a new entertainment district on the parking lots around Citi Field,” whether they view the plan favorably, and whether they’d visit the new “entertainment district.” The poll goes on to ask participants if they would want their elected officials to “work to shape the project so that it is as good as possible,” or “work to stop the project from moving forward at all.”
The question “Do you think Metropolitan Park would be good or bad for people like you and your family?” repeats four times throughout the survey.
Unlike most recent poll, the previous poll — sent April 28 — contained several negative statements about Steve Cohen and the Metropolitan Park project, including one regarding the insider trading scandal in which Steve Cohen’s hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty in 2013 and paid $1.8 billion in fines, and others relating to concerns about gambling addiction and the potential for displacement and gentrification.
Besides the poll, Garcia said he and his neighbors have received several mailers from the Metropolitan Park development team over the past several months, which read like brochures and emphasize the park and community benefits without mentioning the casino.
“A lot of people thought it was actually just going to be a park,” Garcia said. “They didn’t know that it was going to be a casino attached to it because of all the mailings that they received and all the ads they’d seen.”
For Coney Island resident Marissa Solomon, watching the Metropolitan Park project proceed from afar has reminded her of a similar battle in her own community last year, which resulted in the cancellation of plans to build a 1.6 million square-foot casino and hotel complex over intense community opposition. Solomon — who sat on the project’s community advisory committee — described the intense lobbying on the behalf of casino developers during the project’s engagement process, with paid casino advocates packing community meetings and lobbyists canvassing the surrounding neighborhood with pro-casino materials are tactics commonly used by developers to galvanize support, Solomon said.
“Those of us that live in the community have jobs, have lives,” Solomon said. “We don’t wake up trying to figure out how we’re going to stop a casino. We had to do this in our off time and our days off, so that just right off the bat puts communities at a disadvantage.”
Unlike Metropolitan Park, bitter community opposition to The Coney — as the Coney Island casino project was called — ultimately concluded with the community advisory committee rejecting the proposal. In the case of Metropolitan Park, Solomon speculated that ongoing opposition may have brought the development team to continue campaigning in support of the project, despite its construction being all but guaranteed.
“Maybe there is some merit to the opposition’s lawsuit and that they feel they need to strengthen their side a bit more,” Solomon said.
