Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, September 20, 2010

Adrift at SEA

By Dave Anderson:

The Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh has opened its doors to a couple of large A-list touring concerts in September.  The Penguins' 2010 training camp opened early last week.  Their first pre-season/exhibition game is sometime this week.  The regular season opener at the CEC is in a few weeks.  The place will be packed as the Pens play an interesting, exciting and fast-paced style of hockey. 

The big question is how will the Sports and Exhibition Authority pay for all of the debt service.  Currently, debt service on the CEC is split three ways.  $4.2 million dollars is a direct payment from the Penguins to the debt service fund, and $15 million is passed to the debt service fund from casino gambling.  Half of that money is collected from all casinos in the state, and the other half is a direct payment from the Rivers' Casino in Pittsburgh.  The last $7.5 million dollars per year for the next thirty years was a condition on the awarding of the casino license.

The Rivers Casino has not been doing well.  Until the casino went into a selective default by engaging in a debt for equity swap, the casino was burning cash faster than Mick Jagger snorted white powders in his prime.  The problem has been simple, the revenue per machine and the total gross terminal revenue has been way beneath projections.  Over the spring and summer, gross terminal revenue increased to 80% of the state's projections and 70% of the owners' projections, but those gains may not be sustainable.

Chris Briem has the details:

For both casinos the revenues are not only not up since table games
began, but have shrunk pretty continuously to the point that they are
now as low as they were at during some of the worst of winter. At the
Rivers Casino slots revenues are now at their lowest since the first
week of February.  I believe that was literally snowmageddon week...

maybe the casinos have made up some of their gross revenues from table
games, but what has it all meant for tax revenues?  Remember the rate of
tax on table games is a fraction of tax on slots. So even if there was a
1-1 tradeoff from slots to table games, it might be ok for the casinos,
but a big loss for tax revenue.

If gross terminal revenue is dropping to February levels, then the Rivers casino, even with the recent debt restructuring, will be eaten alive by its fixed costs and obligations.  At that point, the CEC payment is under severe doubt, and the value of the implied Commonwealth Lease guarantee to the Sports and Exhibition Authority is called into question at a time when the state is flat broke and does not want to take on any more debt for prestige/amenity projects. 

Ahh, what a nasty political fight that will be. 

[Side note, the casino is also expected to generate sufficient revenue to keep the city libraries open --- I better return some overdue books before the libraries use enhanced fining levels to balance their books]



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