Wynn's Plans for Bridgeport, CT

Mirage Resorts Offers Plan for Gambling on the Bridgeport Waterfront
Published: November 13, 1992

Mirage Resorts today presented a plan for a casino and gaming center on this city's waterfront that, at first sight, looked no more implausible than the dolphins and rain forest at the Mirage desert resort on the Las Vegas Strip.

The center, called the Bridgeport Sporting Club, would be designed to look like a huge New England yacht club or oceanfront home, with clapboards and shutters, and would include attractions from a casino, dog track and parimutuel simulcast theater to an ice rink and an amusement area for children.

"It's time for people who love this idea or hate this idea to have something to criticize," Mirage's chief executive, Stephen A. Wynn, said in presenting the plans to business and political leaders at a luncheon at Bridgeport Jai-Alai, the proposed site for the center.

Mr. Wynn has been lobbying hard to open in Connecticut the first non-Indian casino outside Nevada and Atlantic City. Despite a vow from Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. to veto any legislation permitting a casino, he has proposed a convention center and casino in Hartford, as well as the Bridgeport casino. Mashantucket Pequots Connecticut has one casino, Foxwood, on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian reservation in Ledyard. Federal law permits tribes to conduct gambling if a state allows it; the Pequots qualified because Connecticut allows churches and other organizations to sponsor Las Vegas nights.

In many minds, the Pequot casino made Connecticut ground-zero for a coming explosion of gaming across the country, as other tribes seek to emulate the Pequots' success and states starved for revenue begin legalizing casinos off the reservation so they can share in the profits.

The plan presented by Mr. Wynn today is Mirage's attempt to enter the New York day-trip market. The center includes only one hotel, with 350 to 700 rooms (the Mirage, in Las Vegas, has 3,044 rooms and suites). But it is next to the Connecticut Turnpike and the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, and could be linked to Long Island by hydrofoil ferries.

Mr. Wynn said the center would not be like Las Vegas: "There isn't a speck of neon on this building." And it would not repeat the mistakes of Atlantic City, with its concentration of casinos looming behind a deteriorated city.

He said the Bridgeport center, on the waterfront immediately off Exit 28 of the turnpike, would provide a "completely self-contained environment that can be safe, that can be well-lit, that allows people to come and go without upsetting residential neighborhoods." Jobs and Taxes

He said that he would expect the center to employ 5,000 to 7,000 people and that local residents would have the first opportunity to apply for the jobs. He estimated the center would produce $50 million to $100 million a year in local and state tax revenue.

He also said bluntly that the casino, by itself, was not going to solve Bridgeport's economic or social problems.

"Get it straight," he said. "I think I know how to bring people to Bridgeport, and keep them coming, but there is no reason on earth for any of you to expect for more than one second that just because there are people here, they're going to run into your store, or restaurant, or bar.

"That didn't happen in Atlantic City," he said. "It should never have been promised in Atlantic City. It is illogical to expect that people who won't come to Bridgeport and go to your restaurants or your stores today will go to your restaurants and stores just because we happen to build this building here."