Decision on New York casinos to wait until at least November 21

But the five-member board broke late yesterday without a decision and scheduled its next meeting for Friday, November 21. The board has held several closed-door meetings to review the applications. The board has said all along that its decision would be this fall, as early as October.

There are three bidders for the Southern Tier/Finger Lakes, four in the Capital region and nine in the Catskills/Hudson Valley. No region can get more than two licenses.

Kevin Law, the head of the state Gaming Facility Location Board, had said there's no guarantee the panel will recommend four casinos for three regions of the state. He said they could decide to simply do one for each region. "It says up to four. So the decision could be made to do less than four," Law told Gannett's Albany Bureau.

Still, there remains plenty of uncertainty over who will win the casino licenses. It's a high-stakes battle among some of the biggest names in the gaming industry, including Caesars, Genting, Mohegan Sun and Hard Rock.

Six of the nine proposals in the Catskills/Hudson Valley region are for Orange County — the closest spot to the 20 million people who live in the New York metropolitan area. Because of the size of the region, the odds have been in favor of it getting two of the four licenses — with one each then going to the Albany area and the Southern Tier/Finger Lakes areas.

Orange County is better economically than parts of the Catskills and Ulster County, where there's one casino plan. The goal of the law, approved by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature, is to put casinos where they would provide the greatest economic impact in a distressed region.

So while casinos in Orange County may make the most money, that's not the sole intent of the measure, Law said. Law said the objective is to balance between the needs of each region and the casinos that can be most profitable.