Pennsylvania awards Penn National Gaming a satellite casino license in Berks County

The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board voted unanimously Wednesday to award a license to Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing Association, LLC (Penn National Gaming) to construct a Category 4 casino in Caernarvon Township, Berks County.

The award concludes a process the Board began on April 4, 2018 when Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing Association secured a 15-mile radius area in which it could locate a casino with a winning bid of USD 7,500,003 at the fifth Category 4 auction held by the Board. They filed an application with the Board on October 31, 2018 to locate the facility just off the Morgantown exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It will be called Hollywood Casino Morgantown.

Subsequently, the Board conducted an in-depth background investigation of the application along with the collection of public input from citizens, community groups and public officials at a hearing held in CaernarvonTownship on March 4th of this year. Yesterday, prior to its vote, the Board held a final licensing hearing in which representatives of Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing were questioned by Board members about the project.

A Category 4 Slot Machine License permits the entity to operate between 300 and 750 slot machines. The entity could also petition for permission to initially operate up to 30 table games for an additional fee of USD 2.5 million with the capability of adding an additional 10 tables games after its first year of operation.

According to information presented Wednesday to the Board, Hollywood Casino Morgantown will offer an 89,500 square foot new facility; 750 slot machines; 30 table games with an anticipated expansion to 40 tables; a sportsbook; dining and entertainment facilities.

The facility, which expects to create 275 construction jobs, is targeting a late 2020 opening. When that occurs, Hollywood Casino Morgantown would have 250 full-time equivalent jobs.

The approval of the project followed a hearing held Wednesday in Harrisburg in which Board members were provided an update and asked questions of the representatives of Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing Association.

Township officials saw an opportunity to capture host-community tax benefits for its 4,000 residents that otherwise might go to a neighboring municipality. Penn National estimates Caernarvon would get $1.6 million annually in new tax revenue, or about 62 percent of the town’s current $2.6 million budget, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Penn National, based in Wyomissing, Pa., began with a single Dauphin County racetrack and has transformed into a publicly traded firm with 30,000 employees and 41 properties nationwide. It already has paid a $7.5 million license fee to the state to locate a satellite casino in the area.

Mini-casinos are only one aspect of Pennsylvania’s expanded gaming law that will bring gambling much closer to communities like Morgantown. The 2017 law also legalized sports betting, video-game terminals in truck stops, online gaming, and internet lotteries. The state’s iLottery launched last year, and interactive casino gambling will start in July.

The new law authorized the state’s 13 licensed casinos to apply for up to 10 satellite casino licenses, as long as the new facilities were no closer than 25 miles from an existing casino. More than 1,000 of Pennsylvania’s 2,500 municipalities opted out of hosting a satellite casino by a deadline at the end of 2017.

Under a sealed bidding process last year, five licenses for satellite casinos — technically, they’re called “Category 4” casinos — were awarded before no more bids were received. The state received nearly $128 million just for the five licenses.

Penn National won bids to build two satellite casinos — the other will be in the York Galleria Mall. Stadium Casino LLC, whose flagship casino in South Philadelphia is under construction, will build one in the Westmoreland Mall outside Pittsburgh. Mount Airy Casino Resort won the rights to place a satellite casino north of Pittsburgh. And Parx Casino in Bensalem plans to build a satellite casino in Shippensburg, just off I-81.